


Omori's Law

by forthegreatergood



Series: Refugium [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Frottage, Guilt, Hand Jobs, M/M, Minor Injuries, Mischief, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 11:09:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20692532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: Six thousand years, and you’d think they would know what they are to each other.  Six thousand years, and the trip to Tadfield going a bit off the rails probably shouldn’t come as such a surprise.“You know, you’re very distracting,” Crowley said, when Aziraphale let him up for air, “but you’re not quitethatdistracting.  What is it?”“I wasn’t trying to distract you,” Aziraphale mumbled into his lean chest.  It had simply felt that his heart might burst, if he hadn’t kissed Crowley just then. “I just… I love you so damn much.”“Yes, yes.  In spite of your better judgment, I know.  I love you too, ang--”“No.” Aziraphale twisted out of Crowley’s arms and stared at him.  That hadn’t been how he’d meant it, last night--that wasn’t what he’d been trying to say.  He seized Crowley by the shoulders and held him until he was sure the demon was really listening. “No qualifiers, Crowley.  No caveats.  I love you.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the respective production and licensing companies.
> 
> Thank you to [foxyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxyk/pseuds/foxyk) for the beta!

Crowley pushed his hair out of his face and sat back, frowning at the paper on the table in front of him. He’d meant it to be a proper illustration of a marsh orchid he’d finally terrorized into flowering, but somehow it had turned into a portrait of the angel admiring the damned thing, a disgustingly pleased look on his face as he leaned into the blooms to drink in more of their scent. Somewhere between that departure and Crowley looking at it now, it had all gone completely off the rails.

The colors were too vivid, for one thing. He hadn’t gotten the ratio of water to paint quite right to make acrylics behave the same way his watercolors did, or maybe it was simply that he was always too heavy-handed with the pigment and the watercolors were more forgiving of it. The style and subject called for a palette that was soft and evocative, a sort of _impression_ of the appropriate color rather than a precise replication of it, and he’d pulled everything in the wrong direction. The creams and blues of Aziraphale’s clothes were too forward, the pink of his cheeks too present, too lifelike, the violet of the flowers too incandescent.

The composition was off, for another. Crowley had begun with the idea of painting it as it had happened, Aziraphale leaning in slightly with his hands clasped behind his back, and then he’d mucked it all up by letting the angel on the paper grasp the orchid’s stalk in one loose hand and steady the flower spike with the other. The negative space was practically non-existent, everything was too close and caught up together, and then there was Aziraphale’s face. His lips had parted just as they did in the portrait, and his expression had been precisely as beatific, but the portrait didn’t really call for any of that, did it?

Decorum, Crowley decided. That’s what it called for.

If he was going to paint Aziraphale cradling the orchid like he was about to seduce it, Crowley really hadn’t needed to faithfully reproduce that decadent expression. As it was, he might as well smudge a bruise onto the angel’s throat, dishevel his curls, dab a richer pink into his lips and make him look as debauched as he had when he’d left Crowley’s bed that morning. Crowley shivered in spite of the day’s warmth.

He’d gone to miracle away all the marks he’d left on Aziraphale’s skin--the little welts from his nails digging in too hard, the bruises he’d sucked onto that pretty neck and those sturdy shoulders--and the angel had stopped him, a gentle hand around his wrist.

“Leave them be for now, won’t you?” Aziraphale had said, smiling. “I rather like them.”

Small wonder a simple orchid illustration had turned into pornography, with _that_ simmering away in Crowley’s blood. A perfectly innocent painting, and the angel had ruined it without even being in the room. Four little words, and the shy smile that had gone with them, and suddenly Crowley couldn’t think straight.

He sighed and slid to his feet. If the whole thing was a write-off, he might as well do as he pleased with the portrait before he consigned it to the flames.

It was funny, how he’d thought being free of Hell might make it safe to keep his paintings around. 

He’d never really believed this would happen, and he’d never in a million years have thought it would happen like it had. Not just him free of Hell, and Aziraphale free of Heaven, but the pair of them left to their own devices. It had been an impossible thing built on another impossible thing, and as such it had been doubly impossible to fill in any of the more rarefied blanks.

It had been hard not to daydream, though--after that night in the bookshop when Aziraphale had kissed him and held him and called him beautiful--that maybe, someday, they’d find a way to belong only to themselves. Crowley had thought it was perfectly impossible for the angel to fall into bed with him, after all, and that had certainly happened. Was anything else so far-fetched, afterwards? 

That their furtive, frantic liaison had ended barely a season later in shouting and tears hadn’t, it turned out, made Crowley any less wretchedly hopeful about his chances, or any less appallingly sentimental about his ridiculous portraits.

_Such a pathetic excuse for a hobby._ Crowley’s hand closed around a box of pastels, and he wrinkled his nose. He no longer had to account for himself, or how he spent his time, to Hell. He didn’t have to account for himself to anyone, and he never would again. He could take up an even more pathetic excuse for a hobby, if he wanted. He could master quoits, learn how to macrame, dip a toe into the exciting world of trainspotting. He was his own demon, now. 

Crowley picked a stick--barely more than a nub, really, he’d need to get more soon--of soft white out of the box and bent over the table. Aziraphale’s spotless hands, and his beautiful face, and a brilliant white halo suffusing the whole scene with a holy glow... Crowley smiled to himself at the effect he’d produced and put the pastel back in the box.

Shame the angel loathed his work.

Crowley took a book knife and carefully separated the portrait from the rest of the block of watercolor paper. He propped it up in the sunlight and stood back, admiring it. It was a jumbled mess of intent and desire, but for all that, it was still lovely. 

Aziraphale wouldn’t be by until later unless something came up; Crowley could enjoy it until then. He could enjoy it for as long as he wanted, really, but it was one thing to tell the angel he could stuff it over Crowley’s subpar landscapes and quite another to tell Aziraphale that he didn’t get to have an opinion on paintings of himself. It would have been more efficient to simply stick to things that didn’t include the angel, but Crowley’d already spent too many years doing precisely that. 

When he thought of all the times he’d given in to the impulse to sketch Aziraphale, of all the lovely moments and perfect expressions and tricks of the light he’d caught just _so_, only to destroy the piece immediately lest it prove fatal to its subject… Well, it didn’t bear dwelling on, did it? The past was the past, and what was done was done, and things would be different from now on.

Small wonder, though, that Aziraphale kept finding a way into things now that there was no hiding their association. So long as Crowley got rid of them before they had a chance to irritate the angel, everything would be fine.

Crowley’s lips quirked up. He wondered what look of horrified politeness would paralyze Aziraphale’s features if Crowley broke out the oils, sat down, did a proper landscape, and then made him a present of it. It would probably be the same look Aziraphale had gotten that time he’d found out what Americans considered ‘biscuits.’ The angel could be such a fussy creature, sometimes. 

Not that he could help it, Crowley supposed. He’d forgotten how bleached and blasted Heaven was, how screamingly obvious it was the moment any little thing was out of place or out of order, how even the tiniest of imperfections were magnified all out of proportion to their actual importance. It was like the whole thing had been designed to breed paranoia and self-doubt, and Aziraphale had been chained to it for the six thousand years Crowley’d been essentially left to his own devices. Even the first-glance chaos of the bookshop had a ruthless order to it, an internal logic that Aziraphale hated to see upset or meddled with.

Crowley deflated. No--as entertaining as it might be to watch the angel contort himself trying to express gratitude for something he hated at first sight, just because it was a gift, it wouldn’t do to trifle with Aziraphale’s sense of structure. Not now, not when he was trying to reconstitute it without the archangels looming over his shoulder, ready to gloat over it being somehow wrong, not when he was just trying to get comfortable again in his own head. Crowley thought of the pitcher plant watercolor that had sent Aziraphale into near-hysterics that once and felt a twinge of guilt over the idea of giving him a landscape.

Granted, the watercolor had been designed and executed for maximum horribleness--Merrian by way of Bosch--and Crowley had never imagined that Tabitha would make Aziraphale of all people weigh in on it, but still. The sketches Aziraphale had practically looted from Crowley’s apartment that same week had been perfectly lovely and absolutely straightforward and not at all meant to personally annoy the stroppy fern specialist who kept hogging the coir, and Crowley didn’t think they’d even made it all the way back to the bookshop before they’d been chucked in a convenient skip. 

They certainly hadn’t been in evidence by the time Crowley’d been staggering about the place drunk and desperately trying to convince Aziraphale to help him stop the end of the world, and Crowley hadn’t seen them when he’d had a whole evening to kill poking around the shop in its reconstituted form. Not that he’d been sincerely hoping to find them tucked away in a corner or anything; he wasn’t that much of a lunatic. He’d only started prying in earnest once he noticed Adam’s new additions to the stock. 

Who could really blame him, if it had been more pleasant to think about what nook or cranny the angel might have hidden the drawings in than what might happen to both of them if their brilliant plan didn’t work? It had been such a simple plan, and such a risky plan, and almost all of that unthinkable risk had fallen to Aziraphale, and Crowley’d had to wrench himself away from the phone three times that night, ready to ring Aziraphale and call the whole thing off. 

The search had turned into a sort of demented Easter egg hunt after the second time he’d almost dialed his own number in half a panic that something had already gone wrong. If he could just find one of the drawings the angel had claimed, he told himself, it would be a sign--things would be fine. 

He’d been bargaining with his own imagination, bickering with his own interpretation of the odds, distracting himself so he didn’t lose his nerve. If he found the countryside at Turin, where they’d spent a wonderful few weeks in 1389 blessing everything in sight based on a frankly embarrassing misunderstanding of Aziraphale’s orders, then they’d have good fortune the rest of their days. The dressing room at the Globe, site of so much of Aziraphale’s gushing and fawning and infinitesimal, underhanded bursts of ethereal inspiration, and they’d come through everything swimmingly. Just the sketch of the inn at Athens, its charmingly red-faced angel neatly excised from the picture, and things might go sideways but he’d at least be the one to deal with it. 

Crowley shook his head at the memory. He’d been so weak, that night. He hadn’t found a damned scrap of any of the drawings, but he had found Aziraphale’s prayer circle. He’d had to wrench himself away from _that_ as well as the phone, after he’d stumbled across it. He’d never needed an angelic partyline to howl his grievances at the Almighty, but there was something fiendishly tempting about the possibility of spitting in Metatron’s blessed face right at that moment.

“All he’s ever done is what You asked,” he’d hissed, staring around the bookshop like God might be peering out at him from the piles of papers and folios. “Love humans? Better than any other angel You ever made. Protect creation? Did that, and then some, from literally every other angel You ever made. And now he’s what, going to face their judgment for following Your orders?”

It had been just so… so _Her_ that he hadn’t been able to stand it. 

“If they do this--if they find a way to make him _pay_ for this, more than he already has--and there’s a single fucking one among them that doesn’t land in Hell over it, I swear by every ounce of grace You ever gave me that I will find a way to burn Heaven to the ground.”

A demon promising to avenge injustice on the strength of God’s rescinded gifts, and that had been it for the night, hadn’t it? The only thing left had been to get into the wine and forget about what was to come in the morning, before he embarrassed himself any further.

How wonderful, now, to look at a portrait of Aziraphale shoving his radiant face into a mass of flowers and not have to worry about oaths sworn before God and the books. Crowley shook himself. It wouldn’t really be so bad to keep it, would it? So long as Aziraphale never had to lay eyes on it, what was it hurting?

Just because Aziraphale hadn’t kept the drawings he’d insisted on taking, it didn’t mean anything. He’d been in a mood that whole week--that whole winter, really, from some of the messages that Crowley’d come home to on the ansaphone. Crowley rubbed his chin. Just because he could count on one hand the number of times Aziraphale had acted like _that_ about getting something and then been content to let it go again, it didn’t mean there was anything particular about the drawings. 

Maybe Aziraphale had had to make room for another bookshelf and packed them off to a consignment shop. Though of course, once the angel installed things in the bookshop they had a very decided tendency not to leave it again. Maybe they’d been ruined on the way home from Crowley’s flat.

Maybe Aziraphale had unrolled them in a place with decent light and decided that, instead of being wonderful and marvellous--of being _beautiful_\--the drawings had been right where they belonged when he’d found them. Maybe Crowley was simply trying to talk himself into making a mess of something beautiful because now nothing was technically _stopping_ him from painting the angel larger than life, naked and drowsy and sated, directly onto the wall over his mantel.

It was almost a pity, really; Crowley had been in equal measures pleased when he’d thought Aziraphale had liked the drawings so well and fretful over their provenance. It wasn’t as if he’d signed them, of course, but the more zealous of the Host were as bad as bloodhounds, and one never knew who’d be dropping in on Aziraphale in that plush lair of his. 

Aziraphale had harped on that point often enough, in the brief time Crowley’d been welcome in the bookshop, that a hundred-odd years later it had been Crowley’s first impulse to snatch the sketches back and burn them then and there. Another moment or two, and Aziraphale making it clear that Crowley wasn’t getting them away from him easily, had reminded Crowley that paper and charcoal were paper and charcoal, and drawing a bowl of fruit on a table was hardly a sin. It wasn’t as if even Michael would be able to find anything demonic in a line drawing of the Butter Tower.

But Aziraphale hadn’t been so taken with them after all, and he hadn’t kept them. It was a better reaction than almost fainting at the sight of them, yes, but Crowley had really rather enjoyed that small spark of pride at thinking Aziraphale had wanted the art even if he didn’t want the artist...

Crowley scoffed to himself at the memory. He’d been dreaming. He’d gotten wrapped up in the motorway project, so delighted in everything coming together just as he’d planned, and he’d forgotten himself for a bit. He’d thought maybe Aziraphale was beginning to soften, to miss him, to look for him when he wasn’t around, and he’d figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to let himself think that, and so he had.

He sighed. He’d made such a hash of everything, pestering Aziraphale over holy water. The tears in the angel’s eyes when he talked about it, even now--how had he misjudged so badly? 

It had made sense at the time. It had. He clung to that, even around the gnawing guilt of having caused Aziraphale such pain. 

It hadn’t been caprice, asking Aziraphale for the holy water. Crowley had needed to know he could trust it--trust that it was the real thing, trust that the container it was in wouldn’t spill. Trust that he wouldn’t wind up wearing it through carelessness or malice and then that would be the end of that, drop a tombstone over wherever the resulting puddle soaked in, mark his grave in case anyone wanted to dance on it after word got out. 

He’d slept so long that all of his human contacts had been dead or doddering, and he could have cultivated more, but that took time, time he wasn’t sure he’d had. Easier, faster, and more reliable to simply ask the angel.

And then a hundred years later Aziraphale had given it to him, had handed it over and practically wept with it, and it had changed absolutely nothing between them. Arm’s length and no closer, better have an excuse to send word or arrange a meeting, don’t smile, don’t tease, don’t show weakness. 

Crowley rubbed the back of his neck and reconsidered the portrait. He hadn’t really known how fragile the thing between them was, back in the 1860s. It had caught him by surprise, when he’d wrecked it; he hadn’t known what he was risking, how terrible his offense was. Would he know any better, now? Could he really know better, now? Aziraphale loved him and all right, that counted for a great deal, but Aziraphale had loved him for centuries. And they were free, now, but that changed a few things for Crowley and _everything_ for Aziraphale. The angel was in the process of turning himself into a whole new animal, something utterly his own, unburdened of Heaven’s tyranny.

Crowley’d wormed his way into the angel’s affections thanks in no small part to that tyranny, and Crowley would be an even bigger idiot than he’d been in the past to forget it now. He miracled the portrait into the fireplace, where it sat on the grate like a bright reproach. 

Crowley turned back to the block of paper with its perfectly blank top sheet and its limitless potential, and he wondered if Aziraphale might fancy a show after dinner. Maybe there was a respectable venue showing _The Importance of Being Earnest_\--Aziraphale had always been fond of that one.

He picked up a pencil and settled back in at the table, considering the marsh orchid. 

Just the plant this time, he told himself. Leave the angel out of it.

* * *

“We don’t have to go back in, if you don’t want,” Crowley said, stirring his cappuccino idly. He’d let Aziraphale order it, and the barista had taken one look at the angel’s smile and gone absolutely mad with the milk foam, then topped it all with a sort of bittersweet chocolate sauce for good measure. Aziraphale had of course handed it over and happily left Crowley to deal with the mess on his own. There was no way to drink it as it was without getting it all over his face, and he’d just seen enough of an embarrassment on the stage that he didn’t want to compete with it out in the lobby.

“It would be rude not to stay for the third act,” Aziraphale said, that little flutter in his voice telling Crowley that he believed what he was saying and wished he didn’t.

“Sorry, angel.” Crowley tried to make an escape hatch for the coffee through the half-mile of froth. “I assumed all the reviews saying it was a fresh take on the script and a novel approach to Wilde meant it as, y’know, a good thing.”

“You always did know how to throw a stumbling block in my path,” Aziraphale said, smiling slightly.

Crowley grunted and made an attempt on the cappuccino, then found himself trying to clean the smudge of chocolate off his lower lip without being obvious about it. The sudden intensity of Aziraphale’s gaze, focused on his mouth like Crowley was about to issue another ten commandments, told him that the effort was both a complete failure and a resounding success. An absolutely filthy idea occurred to him, and it was all he could do not to let his face light up with it.

He ran the edge of his thumb along his bottom lip, then sucked the syrup off it. Aziraphale frowned prettily, and Crowley pretended not to notice the disappointment in those blue eyes, tried not to show the thrill it sent through him. The angel had been so proper about things, almost passive, since he’d turned up hammering on Crowley’s door. He was enthusiastic enough for anyone, once everything was proceeding apace, but that lack of initiative itched at Crowley. It itched at him, and, if he let it, it could strangle him, all those doubts curling around his throat and squeezing: _he feels guilty, he needs you, he’s humoring you, he thinks you’ll leave if he doesn’t, it was only ever the opium in the first place, how could he ever…_

Crowley drank his coffee and shoved them all aside. Aziraphale wouldn’t, and perhaps more to the point, Aziraphale couldn’t; he was as fucking terrible at lying now as he’d been back in Eden. If the angel said he wanted him and missed him, and managed to get through it without turning fifteen different shades of red and taking back or over-explaining every other word of it, then the angel meant it. 

And besides, Tadfield would put paid to every poisonous, fragmented whisper; as soon as Aziraphale figured out how to recharge for himself, as soon as he was every inch his own and as independent as he wished to be, then there’d be no question at all of what he wanted or how he wanted it. For tonight, there was that hungry gaze resting on Crowley’s lips, and it was enough.

“It was a nice thought, though,” Aziraphale allowed, watching an impeccably-dressed couple slip out a side door with undisguised envy.

“Nice,” Crowley sneered, shaking his head. It wasn’t like he was proposing they storm out of the place in the middle of a scene, though that would be more his style. “You knew good old Oscar, didn’t you?”

“A… bit,” Aziraphale said cautiously, suddenly on guard.

“A bit.” Crowley rolled his eyes. “Those soppy, cow-eyed dedications he inscribed all your first editions with, and you knew him _a bit_.”

“Was there a point to this?” Aziraphale asked, his tone turning frosty. A warning: _Drop it, fiend_.

Crowley grinned. As if he hadn’t had six thousand years practice when it came to ignoring Aziraphale’s testy admonishments, especially when it came to talking the angel out of martyring himself over the most ridiculous things. “What do you think he’d have to say about this hamfisted disaster?”

Aziraphale’s cheeks turned pink.

“Something clever and funny and absolutely scathing, I bet,” Crowley continued, looking at his coffee instead of Aziraphale’s spreading blush. One of his more biting farces, turned into a straightforward Greek tragedy--Wilde would have had a field day. There’d have been no survivors.

“He was always quite ready with the epigram,” Aziraphale muttered.

“Which one do you think he’d trot out if he saw you slogging back in for another round with it, like a lamb to the slaughter?” Crowley miracled the foam into a more cooperative shape and lifted the cup. The coffee itself was quite good, once the angel’s influence had been brought back down to reasonable levels. It was just proving to be a sort of asymmetric warfare, fought in a theater with no fixed lines or recognized terms of engagement. “‘Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.’?”

Aziraphale gave him an exasperated look. “This isn’t about him, Crowley. There’s the actors and the director to consider--”

“I’m not suggesting that we, in our role as the audience, head back in with armloads of rotten fruit,” Crowley pointed out, smiling. “Though Satan knows it might restore a bit of levity to the thing. I’m suggesting that you let me take you home and, I don’t know, put on some Schumann. Watch a BBC presenter annoy some animals who just want to be left in peace. Undermine my authority with my plants.”

“They’re plants,” Aziraphale said, his expression going pinched. “It’s impossible for them to feel anything that _complicated_ about--”

“Of the two of us,” Crowley cut him off, smirking, “which one is it again who has the advanced degree in plantology?”

“They’d rescind it so fast your head would spin if they heard you calling it that.” 

Aziraphale drank his wine pointedly, and Crowley smirked that much harder. It never ceased to amaze him, how irritating the angel found his academic credentials. It was a bit ridiculous, given that the only one he’d gotten specifically to annoy Aziraphale was the master’s in urban planning that he’d taken in the mid-90s.

“Nobody left to pull it,” Crowley informed him, grinning. “School got taken over by radicals who had the temerity to want legislative authority returned to the people whose country it actually was, and the governor had no recourse but to burn the whole thing down, dissolve its charter, and imprison a couple of the deans. Then the country stopped existing in a bit of an internal re-org--”

“Crowley.”

“Mm?” He finished his coffee and miracled the cup into one of the dishwasher’s bins in the kitchen. When he turned back to Aziraphale, the angel had a very unexpectedly sober look on his face, and Crowley scanned the room, muscles tensing. If there was anything amiss, he couldn’t sense it. “What is it, angel?”

“Dvorak, I think, for tonight.” He drained his glass and passed it to Crowley, who sent it to join his coffee cup.

Crowley offered his arm diffidently, suddenly uncertain of Aziraphale’s mood. He’d meant to tempt the angel out of suffering through the rest of a play he hadn’t been enjoying, not provoke a sudden burst of melancholy. But Aziraphale was agreeing, at least, so that was probably something to consider a victory.

Aziraphale slipped his arm through Crowley’s and sighed as they ventured out of the theater and into the street. They were in the Bentley before Aziraphale spoke again.

“You know, I thought I remembered you knowing Wilde, too,” he said quietly, his eyes on the sidewalk as they drove past.

Crowley regretted keeping to a reasonable speed, if it gave the angel the time and wherewithal to remember things like that.

“Spending a few minutes in someone’s company once is hardly enough to say you know them,” he said, shoulders jerking up in a perfunctory shrug. 

A few minutes, a few hours--who was keeping score? He’d been so awfully, furiously jealous when he’d found out about Aziraphale’s fling with the poet, all he’d wanted to do was batter down Aziraphale’s door and demand to know what he was thinking. And what had it come to, in the end? A long lunch spent making sure at least Aziraphale wouldn’t get hurt any more than loving a mortal already hurt.

“Pity,” Aziraphale said, after a moment. “He was so keen. I think you’d have rather liked him.”

Crowley grunted and went harder on the gas. He’d hated him, personally and with great vigor, around the minor obstacle of rather liking him.

“Be careful,” he’d said, and Wilde had thought it was a threat. 

Brave man, stupidly brave, and if Aziraphale was going to fall in love with a human, why couldn’t it have been with a sensible coward? Wilde had been ready to coolly defy a demon, and Crowley had hated him all the more for having to sympathize with him, for knowing all the idiotic things Crowley himself would gladly have done if only it meant Aziraphale would smile at him again. Defying Hell was the least of it, if he could be assured that the angel’s love would be his reward. Wilde had been as protected by it as any saint, even if he hadn’t known it; Crowley wouldn’t have harmed something that brought Aziraphale joy for all the world.

“Not of me.” Crowley had wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled. “Every blessed person whose face you keep rubbing in how happy they could be if only they weren’t so fucking afraid of what it would cost them. They’ll rip your heart out and make you watch them eat it raw before they let you get away with it.”

And they had, hadn’t they? Crowley could only imagine how devastated Aziraphale had been by the whole thing--he’d slunk off to get utterly wasted in the most Godforsaken hole he could find under the mistaken assumption he’d prefer whatever was going on there to watching an angel’s heart crack in half over a human. 

He’d told himself at the time that he’d been in London too long, that there was an entire rest of the planet that wasn’t going to tempt itself into perdition. His focus had narrowed too much, and he’d forgotten the world at large, and everything it offered, and it was a mistake to be corrected as soon as possible. He hadn’t slipped his collar with Hell just to tie himself down, especially in a place he wasn’t really wanted. He could go anywhere, do anything, and by Satan, he would. 

He’d even--almost--managed to make himself believe it.

It _had_ served to burnish Crowley’s reputation with Hell, though, that thirty years he’d spent stumbling from one spot to the next, taking credit for whatever horrors humanity had unleashed on itself that time. He’d even been responsible for a few of them, indirectly--getting up on soapboxes and preaching that humanity had the means to make themselves a paradise right there on Earth, too plastered to remember how things like that always ended. Hell had practically given him a medal by the time everything, including him, had come home to roost in Europe. He’d been half out of his skull with it, drunk on bright-eyed nihilism and vain hope as much as on whatever liquor was ready to hand. There’d been nothing he hadn’t dared.

Crowley blinked behind his glasses, and then chuckled to himself.

“Care to share the joke, dear?” Aziraphale murmured.

“Sorry. I just remembered that memo I sent claiming to have personally assassinated good old Franz Ferdinand,” Crowley said, shaking his head. “Dagon must be just about tearing their hair out, going through my old paperwork. Or somebody’s hair, anyway.”

“They really didn’t pay you much heed, did they?” Aziraphale said, kneading his temples.

“We-ell.” Crowley sucked at his teeth. The angel had been touchy about the inner workings of Hell since he’d had to deal with them up close and personal. “It’s not like they really _needed_ a specific thing or a fair excuse to start dishing out punishments--not for one-offs. And at the end of the day it was more about keeping the boss mollified than it was the actual objective. ‘Course, it was the same with your lot, minus the honesty and the more direct nastiness.”

“The same with…” Aziraphale turned to stare at him, and Crowley frowned at the expression on his pretty face. Affront, almost, like Crowley had just offered a grave insult.

“Yeah? I mean, just for example, the reaming you got over Spanish flu. You warned them Pestilence was getting carried away, asked for dispensation to act, and got told to let it burn itself out. Turned out to have been a bad call, but who gets raked over the coals for it?” Crowley could hear his tone hardening and tried to keep his anger out of his voice. How desperate must the angel have been to swallow his pride and reach out, back then? They’d both been so angry, and so ready to blame each other over everything. Heaven, Hell, humanity--it hadn’t mattered who’d done what, they’d wanted an excuse to vent all the hurt feelings they’d been sitting on since the ‘60s. “As if it was your job to browbeat them into not being complete clowns. It wasn’t even like they had a real problem with the outcome, it just didn’t feel as much like getting one over on Hell as they thought it would.”

“Did I ever thank you for your help with that?” Aziraphale asked, his lips pursing.

“I wasn’t fishing for gratitude, angel.” Crowley waved a hand dismissively. That hadn’t been the point he’d been trying to make, and trust Aziraphale to dodge it in the way Crowley’d be most likely to overlook. The holy bastard always had known how to make him preen over something.

“But still.” Aziraphale’s frown deepened. “I didn’t, did I?” 

“Oh, for the love of…” Crowley scoffed. “You needn’t bother about it now. And I have no idea how much of it was actually me. Probably none of it.” He caught a flash of something on the angel’s face, too quick to identify, and grimaced. “I tried, as soon as your message reached me. I really did. But you know how it is with the chain of command. Argue ‘til you’re blue in the face, then they have to have a good hard think about it, figure out if putting the kibosh on something benefits whatever they’ve got going on. And Pestilence just got all moony about the Black Death when I tried talking her down, so no telling if anything I said actually got through.”

“You spoke to Pestilence about it.”

“Couldn’t get an appointment with Barbas,” Crowley said with a shrug. Not that it would’ve done much good if he had--Barbas didn’t like him, and the worse things got on the ground floor, the higher rates he could command for his infernal help fixing them, so he wasn’t likely to listen to arguments about going easy on humanity. But Pestilence could usually be reminded that it was bad manners not to leave a few humans for everyone else, and he knew how she liked her absinthe. “Might’ve been on account of him already being on the case, given everything that came out of… You all right there, angel?”

“Oh, yes,” Aziraphale said faintly. “Absolutely tickety-boo.”

“Mmm.” Crowley gave him a long look. “So you’ve either found a game-changing book of lost prophecy or been assaulted with a prybar. Wonderful.”

The angel flushed and bit his lip, his eyes going to the window and his hand reaching for Crowley’s. “Leave it, dear. Please.”

Crowley swallowed thickly. He wanted to pound the steering wheel and snarl for a bit, to grab Aziraphale by the shoulders and make him understand that it had all been a colossal farce, that none of it had been the angel’s fault, that he’d always done his best in a game he’d never been meant to win. All of Heaven poised to smash into the world like a fist, and Aziraphale had gone alone and unarmed to try and _talk_ some sense into them. Stupid, clever, brave angel--everything that had happened, and he was still convinced he could have done something better.

Crowley reached back and took Aziraphale’s hand, interlacing their fingers and squeezing. 

They drove in silence until they made it back to Crowley’s building, and Aziraphale didn’t let go of his hand until they were in the flat.

“Still in the mood for Dvorak?” Crowley asked, when Aziraphale went to pour himself a glass of wine.

The noise that came from the kitchen was noncommittal, and Crowley thought for a moment before inspiration struck. He flipped through his phone until he found the tracks he was looking for, then queued them up. After a moment, the speakers picked up the feed, and Aziraphale leaned out of the kitchen.

“Really?” he asked, a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth as if it hadn’t yet decided whether or not to make an appearance.

“No call to get judgmental,” Crowley said, “not everyone can play the lute as divinely as you do.”

Aziraphale blushed and looked away, the smile spreading across his face after all, and Crowley grinned. Clever humans with their clever music, and their clever ways of recording their clever music, and their clever hands always ready to dredge something from the sands of time and breathe new life into it. He plucked the wine glass from Aziraphale’s fingers and set it on a table, then led him on a turn around the room, spinning him and kissing him until the angel was laughing with it. Crowley hadn’t gotten the chance to do it, before; it had been another six hundred years before Aziraphale had so much as tried dancing, and that hadn’t been with him.

It was almost worth the wait, now, with the way Aziraphale was melting against him every time Crowley pulled him close again. Crowley could lay him down onto the sectional, or lead him to the bedroom, and Aziraphale would let Crowley banish a few more of those lingering shadows, let Crowley lavish a bit more affection on him. Such an impossible dream. Such an easy thing to get lost in.

Aziraphale subsided when the song faded, changing out for another that wasn’t quite as well-suited for dancing. He folded himself onto the sofa, face almost glowing, and Crowley handed him his wine and kissed his cheek. Aziraphale turned his face at the last moment, when Crowley went to pull away, and their lips brushed softly. His hand slipped up and tugged Crowley’s glasses up, off, and set them to the side without the angel taking his eyes off Crowley’s face.

“Aren’t you going to sit down?” Aziraphale murmured, looking up at him.

“In a minute,” Crowley told him, barely managing to keep the intent out of his tone. “Coffee.”

He hummed along to the music as he made himself a cappuccino, this time with a reasonable amount of foam and an absolutely ridiculous amount of chocolate sauce. His cheek tingled where Aziraphale’s fingers had brushed over it, and his lips where Aziraphale had kissed him, and oh, but this was going to be glorious. Most of the syrup was already sliding off the cup’s rim in long, artful loops, oozing its way down toward the saucer, and Crowley smiled.

He arranged his expression into one of pleasant affability and settled in across from Aziraphale. This wouldn’t work if the angel didn’t have a clear view of precisely what he was doing. Crowley lifted the cup to his lips.

“You still play, don’t you?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. The music obligingly lowered its volume to make room for the conversation.

“It’s been--” Aziraphale puffed out his cheeks and sneaked a small, disappointed glance at the seat Crowley had chosen. “--years. We’ve been busy, haven’t we?”

“You should pick it back up,” Crowley said, smiling. He could feel the tiny smudge of chocolate, right at the bow of his lower lip, and Aziraphale’s gaze flicked to it, then away. “I mean, if you want. You did play quite beautifully, you know. I wasn’t just flattering you.”

Aziraphale’s cheeks turned a finer shade of pink, and he pressed his lips together. “Bit old-fashioned, isn’t it? Nobody wants to hear someone play the lute these days.”

“Only because they’ve never heard you play it,” Crowley countered. 

Or rather, because they’d never seen him play it. Aziraphale’s playing was quite good, but the way he simply _shone_ when he lost himself in coaxing those sounds from the instrument was something Crowley had never been able to get enough of. Aziraphale looked so perfectly, luxuriously happy when he was lost in the music he was making, and for a little while all was right with the world. Crowley had forgotten how much he missed it, it had been so long.

He rubbed his chin, leaving a modest thumb-print of chocolate just under his jaw. “What about Spanish guitar? That’s what took over for lutes, wasn’t it? Not exactly all the rage, I know, but there was a show at the Wigmore just last month with nothing but Spanish guitars, got rave reviews.”

Aziraphale’s eyes didn’t leave the second smudge while Crowley chattered on about maybe embracing the inevitable and taking up the harp.

Crowley took another long sip of his coffee and pretended to think. “I bet there’s some sickeningly twee instrument shop lurking about in Tadfield. You want to find it and have a poke through its inventory while we’re down there tomorrow?”

A shadow of worry crossed Aziraphale’s face, and Crowley put his coffee down and tugged his collar a bit looser, scratching absently at his throat. The stripe of chocolate his thumb left behind, just over his pulse, was a good deal less modest than the smudge under his jaw. Aziraphale swallowed, transfixed. Then his eyes rose to meet Crowley’s, and Crowley gave him a knowing look and smirked.

Aziraphale sat back and gasped. “You wicked thing!”

“Mmm.” Crowley leaned back and stretched, and then he raised his hand to his lips and sucked the chocolate off his fingers slowly and with great deliberation. When he met Aziraphale’s eyes again, he gave the angel the most insolent smile at his disposal. “Wickedness, is it? Seems like the sort of thing you’d be called on to do something about.”

Aziraphale practically pounced on him, and Crowley had a momentary spasm of empathy for every serpent ever snatched up in an eagle’s claws, and then he was arching and gasping as Aziraphale’s tongue found the stripe of syrup on his throat. He clutched at the angel’s hips and groaned when Aziraphale’s fingers tangled in his shirt, in his hair, tugged his head back and his shirt down.

“Tormenting, maddening creature,” Aziraphale scolded softly, his mouth moving up to suck at the underside of Crowley’s jaw.

“Demon,” Crowley reminded him, his voice sounding strangled even in his own ears. Aziraphale was wearing too many clothes, and the angle was too awkward for Crowley to get any real friction when he arched up against him, and of course he’d finally coaxed Aziraphale back into some semblance of that delicious _need_ that had characterized their first liaisons only to find himself unable to do much about it.

And then Aziraphale’s lips found his, and he let go of Crowley’s shirt in favor of wrestling open Crowley’s slacks, and Crowley floundered half over the back of the sofa in his attempt to fit both of them on the seat of it while giving Aziraphale room to work.

Aziraphale’s tongue shoving into his mouth was too good, and Aziraphale’s hand closing around his cock was even better, and Crowley’s hands couldn’t get a firm enough grip on Aziraphale’s hips. He didn’t think before he manifested his wings, wrapping them around Aziraphale and pulling him even closer, and there was something in the angel’s soft, sudden _“Oh!”_ that made his heart clench and his spine stiffen and his vision go white.

When he came back to himself, Aziraphale was sucking gently at his throat again and just holding him, and Crowley flexed his wings awkwardly.

“Was that…” Crowley cleared his throat. “Was that all right, angel?”

Aziraphale made a muffled but still very undignified noise into Crowley’s skin and rutted against him, the sharp tent of his trousers dragging across Crowley’s hip as eloquent a reply as Aziraphale was capable of making. Crowley got a hand between them and returned the favor, Aziraphale’s fingers tightening in his hair as Crowley’s wings curled around the angel’s back.

“Faster, please, yes,” Aziraphale murmured, his face pressed into the crook of Crowley’s neck, breath warm on Crowley’s skin. Crowley quickened his pace, hissing as Aziraphale’s muscles tightened involuntarily. “Crowley, please, _more_\--”

It was almost unbearable, how sharply the angel clung to him when he climaxed, fingers digging in like talons, and Crowley was half-hard with it by the time Aziraphale’s grip went slack again.

His whole frame loosened against Crowley, breath escaping him in a long, soft sigh, and Crowley might have enjoyed it slightly more if it weren’t for the untenable arch over the back of the couch. Then one of Aziraphale’s hands dug into his feathers, fingers burrowing through down to find skin, and Crowley bucked against him.

“Wicked thing,” Aziraphale whispered. Crowley shivered and shook him off, tucking his wings safely away. He ducked his head so his lips were against Aziraphale’s ear.

“_Come to bed with me, angel_,” he said, his voice rough with the feeling of Aziraphale’s nails on the featherbed. “_And you’ll sssee jussst how wicked I can be._”


	2. Chapter 2

Aziraphale yawned and stretched, his muscles pleasantly sore, and made his way to the bathroom. Crowley had offered to just miracle the lingering traces of sugar off his skin, but it had been such a long while since he’d taken a hot shower, and besides, he didn’t necessarily trust Crowley not to miracle away a few other things into the bargain. Aziraphale’s fingertips traced the shallow scratches on the back of his neck, and he smiled to himself.

Greedy, wanton creature, drizzling his skin with chocolate wherever he wanted Aziraphale to kiss him. As if there was anywhere the demon didn’t want to be kissed. 

Aziraphale sighed, and his smile grew wider. As if there was anywhere Aziraphale didn’t want to kiss him. 

As if there was any limit to how delicious it was to suck sweetness and salt from the hollow of Crowley’s throat, from the dip of Crowley’s spine, from the crest of Crowley’s hip, to feel the demon quiver in his arms when his tongue slid over a particularly sensitive patch of skin, to hear those muffled cries when Aziraphale’s mouth finally found Crowley’s cock. Not so muffled, after Aziraphale had pulled Crowley’s arm away from his face, when he’d decided to wring every last gasp and plea that he could from the demon’s lips.

Over a century, they’d been waiting for this--half-measures wouldn’t do, when they reached for each other.

Crowley had frowned, when he’d finally come back to himself and seen the few spots where he’d broken skin, his mouth drawing into that pout he always made when Aziraphale suffered some minor hurt or inconvenience. And it stung, it did, especially when he’d worked up a sweat rutting against Crowley’s back, one hand around Crowley’s cock and the other around his lovely throat, Crowley’s arms trembling where they braced against the headboard. 

But Aziraphale had spent so long terrified of leaving any telltale trace on his corporation, squirming in shame at his penchant for indulgence whenever Gabriel’s lip curled over the subject of gross matter, and twisting himself into knots at his desire for Crowley--so long behaving as if his corporation wasn’t his own--that leaving the marks of Crowley’s fingers, Crowley’s mouth, Crowley’s nails right where they were felt like the most decadent sort of rebellion. 

It was petty, yes, but he could fit his fingers over the purple dusting of faint bruises where Crowley had gripped a bit too hard in the throes of passion, and he could feel that it was _his_ corporation. It was his, and if Aziraphale wished to let Crowley touch it, mark it, claim some part of it for the length of a coupling, then no one could gainsay him.

Not that he didn’t appreciate Crowley fretting over the little scrapes and small hurts. That tender solicitousness sent a warm glow rippling across his whole being, reminding him that Crowley’s generosity hadn’t been born of expedience, hadn’t been an artifact of the arrangement. When things had been at their worst, Crowley hadn’t said, “Every immortal for themselves.” It had still been _we_, still been _us_, still been _stay with me_. What they were doing now wasn’t Crowley collecting on some debt hundreds of years in the making, or amusing himself debauching an angel, or killing time before he hit on some new scheme.

Aziraphale turned on the water, waited the moment it took for the spray to heat up, and then climbed into the shower. It was as ridiculous and exaggerated as the rest of the apartment, a dozen different nozzles capable of turning the generous white-tiled stall into a water feature if only Aziraphale could figure out which knobs did what. A heavy rain fell from a flat plate set directly into the ceiling, and Aziraphale tossed his head and let it splash against his face and down his chest. His fingers itched with the memory of soft down giving way to fever-hot skin, and a burst of desire prickled down his spine. 

He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d seen Crowley’s wings, over the years. He’d never imagined that Crowley would let him touch them. And then Crowley had just… wrapped them around him, pressed them against him, filled Aziraphale’s whole field of vision with red hair and golden eyes and glossy black feathers. He’d very nearly lost his head with it, hadn’t he? It had been a triumph of sorts, keeping himself from climaxing until at least Crowley’s hand was on him.

Such a glorious end to such a checkered evening. Crowley’d meant well with that misfire of a performance, but then he’d been so oddly evasive about the play’s author. Maybe it had all been Aziraphale’s imagination playing tricks on him, back in that glittering heyday when he’d thought for a moment that he’d finally gotten Crowley out of his system. There’d been a certain glint in Oscar’s eye when he’d handed over a few of his manuscripts, coyly asking Aziraphale’s opinion, and always the stories in them had offered everything the hero wanted, but for a price beyond measure. It had felt like Oscar had known, like he’d somehow found out what it was Aziraphale had given up when he’d turned his back on Crowley.

Aziraphale shivered in spite of the warm water. _Cut out your soul, send it alone into the world without even the smallest shred of your heart, and refuse it whenever it tries to come back to you._

It had been all too pointed, especially after Crowley had packed up and simply gone. Every time Aziraphale had been dispatched on an errand that took him away from London--away from England--after that, there’d been the sort of poisoned hope that it was to thwart some stratagem of Crowley’s. It never had been; he’d gone home again safe in having done nothing to drive the wedge between them deeper and desperate for having nothing more than hope and empty hands.

“He could repent,” Aziraphale had said, once, a few chapters into Dorian Gray’s slide toward his inevitable damnation. “There could be a reunion. They could still be happy.”

Oscar had kissed him gently, and smiled. “He could repent, but he won’t. And you can’t expect to be happy, worshipping at the altar of beauty--to be on your knees before perfection is its own reward. Being happy with it would spoil the effect.”

A few chapters more, and instead of a reunion, there was a knife plunged into an innocent throat. The murderer was remorseless, happily ensconced in the home he’d made a crime scene of; the victim vanished into the fog, gone abroad and never to be heard from again. Aziraphale had read it and felt the accusation coiled in its pages.

And then there had been times when Oscar had said the most scandalous things, and it had been like listening to Crowley all over again, only without that undercurrent of recrimination, of accusation. Oscar had been saying it without having a millennia-long catalog of all Aziraphale’s shortcomings and failures in the back of his mind, without being capable of waving the same bloody shirts. It had felt all the more shocking for it.

No, Aziraphale had been so certain that the two of them had met. But then surely Crowley wouldn’t have lied about that and then turned around and casually admitted to taking the influenza up with Pestilence?

Aziraphale scrubbed at his skin and tried to banish the thought. He’d gotten a sound ticking off over how the disease had interfered with a few of Uriel’s pet projects--as if they hadn’t simply reprioritized and carried on around the inconvenience--and Crowley had tried to compare that to what would have happened if he’d gotten caught lying about the whole assassination fiasco. Going to Barbas would have been bad enough on its own, but…

Aziraphale had been almost frantic, by the time he’d cabled Crowley. He’d had practically no hope whatsoever of the demon indulging him for old time’s sake, but he’d thought that perhaps Crowley would do it for the chance to gloat over it, to renegotiate for better terms, to have an angel owing him a favor. Crowley had never sent word back--Aziraphale supposed it made sense, if Crowley still wasn’t sure what his efforts had amounted to--but two months later, the flu had finally burned itself out. Aziraphale had tried to convince himself it was a coincidence, that Crowley would have written back if it was his doing, but deep down, he’d known.

He lowered his head and rested his hands on the wall and let the water beat against the sudden tightness between his shoulder blades. _Pestilence._ He hadn’t been able to leave the bookshop without remembering the worst months of the plague, and he’d prayed, and no one had listened. He’d sent a message to Crowley, and Crowley had settled on the rashest course of action available, immediately and without hesitation, and then hadn’t even _told_ him about it. Aziraphale wasn’t sure which one was worse.

It didn’t matter anymore, he told himself. That was in the past. Crowley’d come out of it no worse for wear, and Crowley was napping not thirty feet away from him right now. Tomorrow, they would go to Tadfield, and Aziraphale would figure out how on Earth to do what Crowley had been circling around like a shark with a wounded seal since he’d found out that Aziraphale might run out of power, and Crowley would settle back down.

Aziraphale turned off the water and reached for a towel. They were absurdly warm and fluffy, and he couldn’t help stretching out his senses, finding the muffled, diffuse glow of Crowley’s mind that told him the demon was out for the night. He’d probably dropped off right after he’d miracled the towels as toasty and soft as he could make them, and Aziraphale shook his head. Absurd, adored creature.

He wrapped himself in the towels and sighed. Maybe then Crowley would stop trying to _handle_ him, stop hovering quite so close, stop worrying quite so much. It was gratifying to think that Crowley kept near because he longed for Aziraphale too much to bear the separation; it was mortifying to think that Crowley kept near because he didn’t trust Aziraphale to take care of himself.

And it was, if he let himself think about it, discomfiting to consider the possibility that there were whole piles of things that Crowley might not tell him, might parry with a smile and a night out and a smudge of chocolate, if he thought it might jeopardize Aziraphale’s attempts to conserve power until then. There was so much of Crowley he’d missed over the years, so much he hadn’t let himself have, and he might have been wrong, back in the third decade of Crowley sleeping away in his flat--maybe it _had_ been worse when he just hadn’t seen Crowley than when Crowley was asleep, and Aziraphale just hadn’t known it. 

Crowley had at least been safe, curled up in his bed, dead to the world but with Aziraphale near at hand to make sure nothing happened to him. Crowley hadn’t been out stirring up trouble, taking horrible risks, alone. Crowley hadn’t been out doing things that he could recount with a smile now, but Aziraphale knew too well had been dangerous and unpleasant in the thick of it.

Aziraphale finished drying himself off and hung the towels up. Crowley would doubtless miracle them clean when he woke, but there was no point in being ill-mannered about it. He wrinkled his nose at his corporation in the mirror, then smoothed his hair into some semblance of order and turned around, making sure Crowley hadn’t left any marks that would start a squabble over getting rid of them. And he hadn’t, of course--gentle, careful demon. Even when he could barely remember his own name, even when he was all teeth and nails and writhing, unchecked power, Crowley treated Aziraphale’s corporation as if it were the most precious object in the world, never doing more than just barely breaking the skin.

A bit of tea, Aziraphale decided, and then back to bed. He didn’t want to sleep, not tonight, but he wanted the comfort of Crowley languid and giving and tucked against him, of Crowley right where Aziraphale could keep an eye on him.

He wandered back through the living room, tidying as he went. It was nothing Crowley couldn’t miracle clean and back together in the morning, just like he would the towels, but Aziraphale felt it was cozier, somehow, doing it himself. Like this was a space they shared, instead of a space in which he was a guest. His wine glass and Crowley’s coffee cup, late an instrument of temptation, were moved to the kitchen sink. The edge of a rug Aziraphale had rucked up when they’d danced was smoothed back down. 

A pair of throw pillows--a concession he hadn’t asked for; Crowley hadn’t had any when Aziraphale had stayed there, alone, that first night of the rest of eternity--had been knocked to the floor in that first round of copulation. Aziraphale was gathering them back up again, restoring them to the sofa, when he noticed the ashes in the fireplace.

Aziraphale frowned, trying to think of what the devil Crowley might have been burning. It had been a warm enough day, even for a serpent. They had nothing left to hide, no secrets left to worry about some inquisitive, suspicious colleague discovering. Anything Crowley simply hadn’t wanted would have gone into the trash, surely.

A sort of nameless dread seized him, a conviction that it had been burned because Crowley hadn’t wanted him, specifically, to see it. Aziraphale had managed to persuade himself that he’d seen Hell at its worst, and it had been awful, but Crowley was free. It didn’t matter anymore, what Hell was or wasn’t, because Crowley was never going back. He stared at the ashes now, the burnt remains of something that had once been paper--parchment, maybe--and thought of what a miserable coward he’d been, the last time he’d had even the barest brush with Crowley’s time there.

_“Hell isn’t remotely like the inside of a pitcher plant.”_ And it hadn’t been--the painting that had unnerved him so badly had still been full of light and color. The real thing had been a fetid, suffocating nightmare, everything about it designed to flay whatever was left of someone’s spirit.

Aziraphale stood in front of the grate and took a deep breath to steady himself. Damnable waste of power, that’s what it would be. An indefensible invasion of privacy, if he did this. Crowley had opened his home in a way Aziraphale had no right to expect or demand, and Crowley had clearly never meant for him to go poking around in this particular thing, and…

And he needed to know. He wouldn’t--couldn’t--look away. Not this time, not now.

Aziraphale reached out and expended just enough power to turn back the flame’s mark. It wasn’t undoing what Crowley had done, just sort of rewinding it so that he could get a look at it. Crowley wouldn’t mind so much, surely. 

And then, sitting in the fireplace, was a lovely painting done on fine, stiff paper. It was the marsh orchid he’d been admiring just the other day, all vivid hues and subtle washes and perfect proportions. Aziraphale knelt and frowned. How could something so innocuous have needed burning? 

He went to pick it up, and found that it wasn’t alone--there was a second painting just under it, stacked neatly before being set alight. The same orchid, except this time Aziraphale was still admiring it, a rapturous expression on his face; in the painting, his hands were curling around stem and digging into the petals as he hadn’t dared in real life. The same orchid, but this time there was such a fierce, hot, _unbearable_ flash of love running through him when he looked at it that he flinched away from it, dropping both paintings back on the grate and losing the thread of the miracle that had given them back their form.

They crumbled into ash before his eyes, and Aziraphale raised his hand to his mouth, staring at the fireplace.

It had been like a jolt of electricity, that feeling of love, like beginning to fall and finding a steadying hand on his arm at the very last moment. Like standing right in front of a fire after too long in the freezing cold. He wanted it back, desperately, even as he wondered if it could really burn him as badly as it felt like it would. And Crowley had...

Aziraphale stumbled to his feet and turned back to the bedroom, his hands shaking. He needed a moment or two to compose himself, he thought, but more than that he needed Crowley in his arms again. He almost tripped twice, clumsy in his haste, and he felt cold even though the apartment wasn’t, and it was all he could do not to laugh when he saw Crowley’s thick, dark coils wrapped firmly around every last pillow on the bed.

Aziraphale shook himself. It was Crowley, just Crowley. All he needed was Crowley. He climbed into bed, pulled the blankets around himself, and sighed at the warmth.

“Come here, will you?” he murmured, trying to pry the serpent loose from his goose-down, silk-cased prey.

Crowley grumbled to himself, hissed words incomprehensible from under the last pillow, but he let go readily enough under Aziraphale’s gentle tugging. Aziraphale pulled Crowley into his lap and hugged as much of him as he could gather in his arms to his chest, and Crowley yawned and looped his head and neck over Aziraphale’s shoulders.

“_All clean, now, are we?_” he asked, voice heavy with sleep.

Aziraphale leaned back against the newly freed pillows and kissed Crowley’s drooping eyelids. “I love you. You do know that, right?”

“_You’d better, if you’re going to keep ssstealing all the pillowsss._” Crowley tucked his head under Aziraphale’s chin.

“I mean it,” Aziraphale said softly, rubbing the edge of Crowley’s jaw. “I love you. I’ve loved you so much and for so long that it felt like… it felt like refusing orders. I knew I shouldn’t, but I could never stop. Even when I thought you’d given up on me, I couldn’t stop. You always meant the world to me, and,” he swallowed, “and I love you.”

Crowley scoffed and shifted in his arms, and Aziraphale tightened his hold, and then Crowley was sitting in his lap, arms around Aziraphale’s neck and thighs bracketing Aziraphale’s hips. Drowsy amber eyes stared at him, and then Crowley kissed him gently. 

“I couldn’t have given up on you even if I’d wanted to, angel. Which I didn’t, just for the record.” Crowley rested his cheek on Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Loving you was the only thing that made any of it bearable.”

Aziraphale squeezed Crowley’s chest against his and blinked back tears at that simmering, scalding love dancing just under Crowley’s skin. There’d been a time when he’d have given anything for loving Crowley to mean something other than what it meant, when he’d been convinced that loving Crowley made him a traitor, when he’d thought that loving Crowley was some terrible flaw in him and it was only a matter of time before it cost him everything he was. 

Loving Crowley had felt worse than failing in the Garden, when he’d first realized what it was--it had felt _disobedient_, in some fundamental, bedrock way, in spite of never having been told he couldn’t. What a fool he’d been, to think that love was ever a sin. What a fool he’d been, to run from this.

He rolled Crowley sideways onto the bed and stretched out against him, pulling Crowley close and burying his nose in Crowley’s hair.

“I just needed to tell you,” he sighed, stroking Crowley’s back. “I needed to make sure you knew.”

Crowley wriggled more firmly against his side and purred, and his eyes closed, and it seemed that sleep claimed Crowley more quickly than it had the last time they’d done this, that there was less tension to drain out of his lanky frame this time. Aziraphale pressed a kiss to Crowley’s shoulder and cradled him gently, and Crowley sighed and drifted off in his arms.

Dawn came too soon, and Aziraphale almost wanted to put off their trip, to let Crowley keep sleeping. Crowley would snap at him if he said anything about it, but it wouldn’t have taken a six thousand year friendship to let Aziraphale spot the lingering fatigue in his posture and his eyes and the lines of his face. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the Great Plan had taken it out of him, and Crowley hadn’t managed to sleep it off quite yet. 

It wasn’t an issue of power, Crowley had kept assuring him--the whole world was still brim-full of it, as much as any demon could want. Aziraphale had felt a twinge at that blithe assurance, at the simple fact that Crowley had never understood how bottomless that _want_ could truly be for some of his colleagues. For some of their colleagues, really; angels were hardly exempt from that sort of avarice. Aziraphale suspected, however, that if there was a way to simply miracle himself rested and calm again, Crowley had yet to find it. It was most likely just a matter of time, with those marks getting sharper whenever something brought him up on point, looking around for a threat, and softer whenever they were together and everything was very clearly fine.

Aziraphale reached down to where Crowley was pillowed on his chest and ruffled the demon’s hair, then let his hand rest on the nape of Crowley’s neck. He smiled fondly when Crowley squirmed against him, still asleep and blindly trying to somehow find a way to slither closer than they already were.

Tadfield was a better place than most to recuperate, though, and it would be nice, staying somewhere that wasn’t so firmly marked as belonging to one or the other of them. He thought of the walk-up, and his grip on the back of Crowley’s neck tightened slightly. It was occupied at the moment, and besides, he wasn’t entirely sure of how Crowley might react. Well, he hoped, but one never really knew--the mercurial creature curled up against him had more surprises than a Babylonian marketplace, sometimes.

Like that little trick he’d played with the chocolate, prattling on about harps and instrument shops while Aziraphale had been twisting himself into knots trying not to be too forward, too demanding. Aziraphale felt his cheeks heat with the memory of that molten, satisfied look in Crowley’s eyes when Aziraphale’d finally realized that he was being led about by the nose. 

It had just been so long since Crowley had really made an attempt to seduce him, hadn’t it? Since the night they’d gotten drunk together and hit on the idea of being godfathers, at least--and all right, they’d had other things to worry about, but it hadn’t changed since. They would sit too close, or go to bed, or Crowley would take his hand, and one thing would follow another until they were locked in a messy, panting, delirious embrace. Nothing to complain about, certainly, but it left some needy, embarrassing part of him wondering if he hadn’t ruined things, just a bit--tarnished them--by refusing Crowley in all the hurtful little ways he’d found over the years. If he hadn’t taught Crowley that being too honest about what he wanted could only end in a rebuke.

He’d even done it again that day he’d been so desperate for Crowley’s company that he’d strongly considered breaking down the door, when Crowley had asked him to come to bed and he’d somehow found the nerve to protest. He’d stared at Crowley’s bare skin like a starving dog slavering at a roast, and he’d kissed him, and he’d wept over him, and then he’d turned around and denied anything more carnal than that. _Make love for hours, until there’s nothing left in the world but each other, until I smell more like you than myself, until my hands have forgotten the feel of everything but your skin? My good fellow, that’s not what_ I _came here for, certainly!_

And Crowley had called him presumptuous, and had teased him about it, and had very deliberately not taken the offer off the table, if Aziraphale wanted it after all. But Crowley hadn’t really repeated it, either. Crowley was hesitant, now, when he reached for him. 

Aziraphale let his thumb trace gentle circles on the back of Crowley’s neck, and Crowley sighed softly. Lashes fluttered across the skin of his chest, and then Crowley was turning his head and grimacing at the scattered blotches of sunlight making it in through the blinds. When he looked back at Aziraphale, he frowned, suddenly serious.

“’ve you been crying, angel?” he asked, pushing himself up on one elbow. He reached out to cup Aziraphale’s face even as Aziraphale tried to put a denial into words.

“Of course I haven’t been--” He felt the cool wetness on his cheek as soon as Crowley’s thumb brushed the tear away.

“What’s wrong, then?” Crowley sighed, twisting himself upright and pulling Aziraphale into his arms. 

He ran his fingers through Aziraphale’s hair and bent to kiss his forehead, and Aziraphale found himself pulling Crowley down for a searing kiss instead. 

“You know, you’re very distracting,” Crowley said, when Aziraphale let him up for air, “but you’re not quite _that_ distracting.” He kissed the crown of Aziraphale’s head. “What is it?”

“I wasn’t trying to distract you,” Aziraphale mumbled into his lean chest. It had simply felt that his heart might burst, if he hadn’t kissed Crowley just then. “I just… I love you so damn much.”

“Yes, yes.” Crowley yawned and wrapped his hand around Aziraphale’s shoulder. “In spite of your better judgment, I know. I love you too, ang--”

“No.” Aziraphale twisted out of his arms and stared at him. That hadn’t been how he’d meant it, last night--that wasn’t what he’d been trying to say. He seized Crowley by the shoulders and held him until he was sure the demon was really listening. “No qualifiers, Crowley. No caveats. I love you.”

He could feel the flickering, white-hot love curling around Crowley’s core, even without looking for it this time, and he could singe himself on it, couldn’t he?

“I’m sorry for all the times I hurt you. All the times I meant to, all the times I didn’t, all the times it never occurred to me that’s what I was doing,” Aziraphale continued quietly. Crowley squirmed in his hands and looked away, and when he opened his mouth to deflect, or accept it too easily, to brush it aside, Aziraphale stopped him with a kiss. He pushed Crowley down onto the bed without breaking the kiss, hands on the back of Crowley’s skull and Crowley squirming under him, and he felt like he was choking when he finally pulled back enough to keep talking. “For all the times I pushed you away--”

“You don’t need--”

“For all the times I refused to understand you,” Aziraphale continued, “for all the times I closed my eyes to what was right in front of my face--”

Crowley hissed and tried to roll them over, refusing to meet Aziraphale’s eyes. “You have _never_ needed--”

“_I am sorry_.” 

Aziraphale pinned him more firmly, muscles burning with the effort of keeping the demon where he needed him, heart burning with everything he could feel pouring off of Crowley. He kissed Crowley again, and Crowley’s mouth opened under his, and Aziraphale’s skin felt too tight on his flesh.

“I’m sorry, and I love you with everything that’s left of me,” Aziraphale panted. “I haven’t said it enough, and I should have said it sooner.” 

He pressed his face to Crowley’s throat, and he was hard, of all things, hard as granite from this. Crowley writhed helplessly under him, his knee sliding between Aziraphale’s thighs, desire meeting desire, and Aziraphale wanted to rut against him.

“Beloved,” Aziraphale said. Crowley’s frame jerked, a soft cry escaping him, and he spilled against Aziraphale’s belly. Aziraphale wrapped his arm around Crowley’s chest, and he buried his fingers in Crowley’s hair, and God, how had he ever thought this was something to be ashamed of? “_Beloved._”

And then Crowley’s wings were wrapping around him, curled around his back, feathers brushing over his thighs, his calves, and when Aziraphale came, he could feel that white-hot river of Crowley’s love rushing over him, and for a brief, perfect moment, he burned with it.

When he opened his eyes again, Crowley’s head was thrown back, eyes closed and lips parted, and the only thing Aziraphale could say was, “Beloved.”


	3. Chapter 3

The drive to Tadfield was quiet, compared to that morning. Crowley tried to swallow around the brick-sized lump in his throat. A fucking bomb going off would have been quiet, compared to that morning. The angel made it easy to forget how relentless he could be, under all that softness and love, and Crowley felt like an oyster with its shell pried open. 

It helped, that Aziraphale hadn’t stopped touching him since. It didn’t help, knowing that there would be times when Aziraphale wasn’t going to let him run from a reckoning. That there would be times when he’d be caught out, exposed, and Aziraphale wouldn’t look away.

The angel shifted against his side now, straightening up and giving Crowley a warning look without putting any distance between them.

“The odds of anyone else coming rocketing out of the woods at the precise same point and smashing themselves into the side of--”

“Just slow down, dear,” Aziraphale scolded. “A little. Please.”

Crowley scowled and tapped the brakes. It was more than a little, and he hoped Aziraphale was happy, the bastard. Crowley froze at that thought, trying to squeeze around the fact that Aziraphale _was_ happy--more obviously and uncomplicatedly happy than he’d been since Armageddon’s failure to launch--and that he was, moreover, happy enough to be all but glowing with it.

Astonishing, what a rancid burden guilt could be--and how long had his poor angel been bearing up under it? Crowley sighed and tightened the arm slung across Aziraphale’s back, squeezing him against Crowley’s side for a moment. The angel practically purred and let his head rest on Crowley’s shoulder.

He’d let himself fantasize about Aziraphale apologizing precisely once, when he’d been cooling his heels in Peshawar and too stoned to think it through. It had started innocently enough, with the usual cartoonish blandishments and vague regrets, the sort of thing he could almost laugh at himself for wanting with a head full of smoke and the angel safely on an entirely different continent. And then… and then he’d imagined what he really wanted, and it had felt precisely like that horrible stretch he’d spent trying to pretend the Fall had been a mistake, a misunderstanding, that God was simply teaching them a lesson, that everything would go back to the way it was as soon as She realized She could no more bear their absence than they could bear Hers.

He’d been sick with it for a week, afterwards, and if there’d been anything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the area with the requisite chemical compounds to blot that thought from his mind, he hadn’t found it.

Insofar as he’d been capable of contemplating the subject after he’d stopped trying to lobotomize himself, it had been abundantly clear that Aziraphale could perhaps have stood to take back a few unfair accusations, and correct his stance on a subject or two, and in general be significantly nicer to him and more complimentary about his fashion choices. What Crowley _wanted_, however, wasn’t piecemeal retractions but a wholesale reconciliation. And that, as he’d learned--far too long ago to try ignoring the lesson while he was knee-deep in the rotting ruins of yet another dying empire--was a thing that couldn’t be earned, or owed, or bought, or expected. It was given freely or not at all, and it came on its own schedule, if it came.

He’d been so flattened with the realization that he’d let himself be bundled onto a troop carrier and ferried back to London, which had taken weeks and caught him four separate diagnoses of shellshock before it occurred to anyone that he might be a journalist and not a soldier. He’d been neither, of course, but it had been easier at that point to agree with the new supposition. If he was a journalist, then he’d been completely within his rights to tell them to fuck off when they’d asked what unit he was with, and--of course--simply making a grim joke when they’d insisted and he’d told them that he was a forward scout for Hell’s light infantry and that his commanding officer was Satan himself. 

It had certainly felt like a joke, when he’d been ejected onto the streets of the one city he’d been avoiding since Gladstone and Disraeli’d finished up with their game of musical chairs.

What it had never even occurred to him to want, around all that fucking nonsense, had been Aziraphale groveling. Aziraphale _suffering_.

Crowley kissed Aziraphale’s hair where it met his temple and tried not to think of it, tried not to spoil the mood. Aziraphale didn’t need him skulking around in the background like a gargoyle, fuming over the self-lacerating reflexes that Heaven had spent the last eternity beating into him, while he tried to get the hang of grabbing his own power.

“Pull in at the store just there on the corner, would you?” Aziraphale asked, after a moment. His eyes were bright, and there was a broad smile on his face, and Crowley was doing as he’d asked before it even occurred to him to ask why.

“Feeling a bit peckish?” he asked.

“Mmm.” Aziraphale smiled slyly, his cheeks turning pink, and he wriggled free of Crowley’s arm. “You’ll see.”

When he came back out of the store, Crowley could only tilt his head at the oversized picnic basket in the angel’s arms.

“Angel--”

“I’ve been waiting to take you on a picnic for over fifty years, Crowley.” There was a note of warning under it, a more pleading one this time: _Don’t ruin this, please._

It was Crowley’s turn to flush at that. He should have known what was next on the list, after that dinner at the Ritz. After that scalding litany of things Aziraphale was sorry for. After that atom-splitting _beloved_ groaned into his skin.

He still couldn’t look directly at that one, had to circle it and look at it from the corner of his eye and pretend that perhaps it was just something Aziraphale had blurted out in the heat of the moment and didn’t mean in the bone-deep oath-swearing way he’d said it.

“Do you need any of it kept cold, or warm?” Crowley asked, instead.

“Ah.” Aziraphale’s smile returned in full force. “No, I don’t think so--they threw in a few ice packs, for that sort of thing. And I was hoping we might eat soon?”

“Sure, whenever you like.” Crowley pulled back onto the road. “Any place in particular in mind?”

“There was a lovely park…” Aziraphale trailed off and looked around, his lips pursing. “Someone will be able to give us directions, I’m sure.”

“You don’t know?” Crowley’s brows knit.

“Oh. Ah.” Aziraphale cleared his throat and gave Crowley his best look of prim confidence, and Crowley could do nothing but brace for impact. If Aziraphale was giving him _that_ look after everything that had happened the past few weeks, whatever he was about to say was guaranteed to be the genuine article. “I spotted it from a rather elevated position, you understand. I could get us there as the crow flies, as it were, but since we’re currently on the ground, it might be best if we…” He licked his lips, then soldiered on. “If we stayed there.”

“From an elevated position?” Crowley echoed. “What, Madame Tracy had a pilot’s license and an ultralight?”

“Not as such,” Aziraphale murmured, tugging at his waistcoat and looking out the window. He risked a glance at Crowley. “Do watch the road, dear.”

“Not as such?”

“I’ll thank you not to take that tone with me when _you_ pulled up in a car that was completely engulfed in flames and subsequently, in very short order, exploded,” Aziraphale sniffed. “How did that happen again?”

“Oh, you know, one thing and another. Bound to happen eventually, really.” Crowley was impressed with himself, how nonchalant he managed to sound around a clenched jaw. “But I seem to recall that we were talking about you?”

The mumbled answer was so fast, and so low, that Crowley almost didn’t catch it, and then it took him a full minute to reconcile what the angel had said to the fact that the angel had done it.

“You miracled a Vespa into a… a…”

“A flying Vespa,” Aziraphale supplied, in an even, measured tone that Crowley thought must have been specifically selected to vex him.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Crowley growled, glaring at him around the edge of his glasses. “I left as soon as you said to get to Tadfield, and I must’ve done a hundred and fucking ten the whole way once I’d cleared that mess on the M25, and you’d not only beaten me here but already started a dust-up with the guard. And once a levitating motorscooter is chugging along at well in excess of a hundred miles an hour, it’s not a flying Vespa, it’s a bloody rocket with handlebars.”

Aziraphale crossed his arms and huffed. “We were wearing helmets.”

Crowley took a deep breath and decided it would be bad form to scream, however much the angel might make him want to sometimes. He dealt with the urge by not bothering to come to a complete stop when he hung out the window and shouted for directions at the nearest pedestrian, and then spent too much time resisting Aziraphale’s efforts to haul him back into the car to fully understand them when he got them.

“At least I didn’t turn into a serpent first,” Crowley said brightly, when Aziraphale glared at him. He turned down the road the old man had indicated and floored it.

Aziraphale’s fingers drummed on the armrest, and he looked out the window with a sort of intent that made the back of Crowley’s neck itch. 

“What mess on the M25 was that?” he asked eventually.

“Hmm?” 

Crowley made what he hoped was the correct turn, and wondered if he could actually get away with lying to the angel. He’d been so fucking proud of himself with the M25, so sure it would get Hell off his back for a bit and let him go back to coasting by on the sort of petty malfeasance that didn’t make him feel like a fucking executioner by participating in it. Aziraphale had been uncharacteristically restrained in his moralizing while the project was ongoing, or maybe he’d been pointedly ignoring Crowley to punish him for some offense or other, but there was no way in hell he wasn’t in for another speech about evil and the seeds of destruction if the angel found out what had happened there.

“What mess on the M25 was that?” Aziraphale repeated. He didn’t look away from the window when he raised a hand to his lips and began chewing one of his perfectly-manicured nails.

“Oh, you know.” Crowley waved a hand. There would be a sign in the next hundred feet or so if he hadn’t taken the wrong fork or completely misheard the man. “Gridlock. People getting weird on account of the whole Antichrist coming into his power thing.”

And there was the sign, which meant he’d gotten it right after all, and then there was a ridiculously acute curve that was practically a hairpin, and he’d taken the whole thing a bit fast for something like that. Aziraphale began to tip into him and clutched at the seat, and Crowley put out a steadying hand around wrestling with the wheel.

“The lanes all dissolving into a wall of fire,” Crowley muttered.

The Bentley felt almost miffed with him when they were back on a straight course, and Crowley patted the dashboard affectionately.

“The weather was already turning all Apocalypse-y by then, too, which didn’t help with the traffic or the people being weird,” he continued, grimacing. “I mean, I expected--”

“I’m sorry, what was that middle bit?” Aziraphale asked, raising an eyebrow.

“People getting weird?” Crowley hazarded.

“After that.”

Crowley pretended to think about it. 

“The weather turning all Apocalypse-y?” He slapped his knee and groaned. “Apocalyptic! I meant to say ‘the weather turning all apocalyptic.’ Just pretend I said that instead, yeah?”

“Before that,” Aziraphale said, folding his hands in his lap.

“Mm.” Crowley sucked at his teeth. Maybe he could just pull over and kiss the angel. It was an acceptable tactic, wasn’t it? All was fair in love and slithering out of lectures, and this counted as both.

“Crowley.”

“The lanes all dissolving into a wall of fire?” Crowley asked, smiling. Maybe Aziraphale would be too appalled at his shamelessness to tell him he’d had it coming.

Aziraphale stared at him, his brows furrowing and his lips pursing, and he did look appalled but it wasn’t the sort of appalled exasperation Crowley’d been hoping for. He looked almost upset. 

“And you right there in the middle of it,” Aziraphale sighed. “At least you were on the right side of it when it went, but it must have been such a close call…”

Crowley bit his lip. It wasn’t likely a lecture he was in for, then--not with that sigh leaving the angel’s lips. But he could leave it at that, couldn’t he? He could breeze over it the same way he’d breezed over a million other things when he hadn’t wanted to upset Aziraphale, and upsetting Aziraphale wouldn’t have served any purpose, and Aziraphale would be upset by something else soon enough, why did it always have to be _him_ upsetting Aziraphale…

Aziraphale was looking at him now, instead of out the window, and he could feel those eyes on him like a cold sweat starting on his scalp.

“You didn’t,” Aziraphale said softly.

Crowley shrugged. “Honestly, it was the fastest way to get rid of Hastur.”

The angel somehow found a way to look even more alarmed. “But the holy water--”

“Took care of Ligur right enough, and absolutely put Hastur on notice, but he knew I didn’t have any more of it. And really, there’s only so much time you can buy yourself, with a bastard like that.” Crowley puffed out his cheeks. “Without pulling onto the shoulder and driving straight into a wall of hellfire at fifty miles an hour, anyway. Got a full twenty-four hours, with that maneuver.”

“That’s not funny.” Aziraphale frowned at him, and Crowley scowled.

“Which one of us actually managed to get himself discorporated, again?” he snapped. He hadn’t meant it to come out quite so sharp, but it was still hard not to think of the burning bookshop and feel like he was burning right along with it, like he was watching the last thing that made his existence worth bothering with crumble into ash and soot right before his eyes. His place in Hell had been gone, the whole Earth was about to go up in smoke--why wouldn’t the angel be the first treasured, irreplaceable thing thrown onto the world’s funeral pyre?

He almost missed the next turn, swore, and slammed on the brakes, hand flying out to press Aziraphale back against the seat before he could lose his balance or upset the basket. They were close, now, and Crowley would have to stop tearing around the place if he didn’t want to overshoot it entirely, which would at least improve Aziraphale’s spirits.

“Look, angel.” He exhaled slowly and ran his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t do it for fun, or to get out of having to take a detour. It was either try to blast through it or just give up. And I thought, if we blow this, then the whole world’s going to wind up looking like this anyway, so it doesn’t really make any difference. There wasn’t any running from it.”

Crowley pulled into the tidy little parking lot of what looked to be a tidy little park and turned off the Bentley.

“And besides,” he said, finally turning to look at Aziraphale, “you’d said to meet you there, and I knew you’d find a way, and I couldn’t leave you to face whatever was coming alone.”

Aziraphale shook his head. “Reckless.”

“Only out of necessity, that time,” Crowley said firmly. He looked at the basket. “If you don’t still want--”

“You drove straight through a wall of flame so hot the car was still on fire from it when you found me at the damned air base, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, glaring at him. “We are having our picnic, and we are going to enjoy ourselves, and--”

Crowley leaned across the seat and kissed him. Aziraphale stiffened--deciding whether or not to keep being irritated with him, probably--and then softened under it, opening his mouth and letting Crowley’s tongue slide against his. After a few minutes of Aziraphale kissing him back hard enough that it was safe to assume he was forgiven, Crowley sat back and smiled.

“Yes, I suppose we are going to enjoy ourselves, aren’t we?”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes but smiled back and picked up the basket. “One of these days you’re not going to be able to tempt your way out of trouble, Crowley.”

Crowley let his smile go crooked and wiggled his eyebrows. “That’s what bluffing my way out of trouble’s for, dearest.”

* * *

Crowley had to admit that it had not after all been such a burdensome thing, going on a picnic with an angel. The basket had been so big because it had included a full-sized blanket for them to lounge on while Aziraphale ate and Crowley swilled as much of a lovely red blend as he wanted, and then Aziraphale had insisted he have some of the chocolate mousse, which really had been quite good. It had been so good, in fact, that Aziraphale had kissed the last of it right back out of his mouth, and after a bit of that, it had either been pack it in for the day and head to the bed and breakfast they’d hired for the week or put his foot down and send the angel off to dowse for power.

“It’s going to be wonderful,” Crowley had promised him, running the tip of his finger over that adorable pout. Aziraphale was one to talk, about tempting one’s way out of trouble. Crowley was half convinced he was only being as decadent as he was because he was nervous about the whole thing and trying to put it off. “You’re going to be head over heels for it, angel. All the miracles you want, and no celestial meter-readers chasing after you demanding overage reports or trying to throttle you just to keep you under their thumb.”

Crowley lounged back on the blanket and watched the cream dot of Aziraphale’s coat disappear into the wooded path at the edge of the lawn. The pang he’d felt at the angel sulking had been unexpected, but then again maybe it shouldn’t have been. They’d barely been out of each other’s company since doomsday, and it had been as much Aziraphale as it had been him. Sending him off to traipse through what really was quite a charming park by himself probably hadn’t been the ending Aziraphale had imagined for their picnic, and sending him off alone over his objections certainly wasn’t something Crowley’d ever liked doing.

The day was still young, though, and Crowley was sure that once Aziraphale got the hang of catching out those bits of happiness and joy without thinking about it, there would be the whole village to practice on. It was just that to get the hang of it, Crowley was sure he’d want as few distractions as possible, and certainly as little interference as possible, and Crowley was still, after all, a demon. As much as Aziraphale might like to pretend Crowley was packing him off to grandmother’s house with a basket of goodies through prime wolf territory, the whole thing would go more quickly if he was by himself. It was a testament to how much Adam really cared about the place that Aziraphale had been able to pick up on it at all, with Crowley standing right next to him and in a foul mood to boot.

Crowley propped himself up on his elbows and looked around the park. It was, he thought, probably an easy place to love, if one was equipped for that sort of thing. He thought of painting the landscape and smiled to himself. Maybe someday, when the angel was in a better mood and less prone to crying over even the most negligible things. Aziraphale had always had to keep such a tight hold on himself; small wonder it was spilling over the edges now. Crowley lowered himself back down to the blanket, tucked his hands under his head, and watched the clouds roll by. 

There’d been a great many things Crowley had never dared say and had barely dared think or feel, but everything else had been either permitted or encouraged. One of the many perks of being a demon, really--one wasn’t called on to bury _everything_ under some placid, beatific mask. Poor Aziraphale had been biting his tongue for millennia, and then feeling guilty for what he’d been made to keep quiet over. 

Crowley’s lips twitched. He should probably say something about that apology. 

He’d known, more or less, what he was getting into once he’d realized what was happening. He’d met Aziraphale on the wall, and he’d been so charmed by the fretting worrywart of an angel who’d given away his sword anyway and damn the consequences that it hadn’t occurred to Crowley not to keep the conversation going as long as he could, which had been about four thousand years, give or take. Not a bad run, really. And then he’d been trying to drown his sorrows in Rome, and Aziraphale had invited him out for dinner, and meant it, and been so fucking _kind_ about everything, and it had been like running face first into a hedge.

Crowley hadn’t realized, up until then, that demons _could_ love. They’d all of them been created with one purpose--love God--and that had been taken away from the Fallen, and Crowley had just sort of assumed that the general, all-purpose affection he’d managed for humanity and life since then was both a fluke and all he had to offer. But Aziraphale had tried to cheer him up, and had smiled to see him smile, and it was as if his heart had suddenly started beating again. But it hadn’t been love, not yet, not quite, and he could have walked away.

He’d known it would hurt, if he didn’t, and he’d known that it wouldn’t be returned--that Aziraphale would be horrified if Crowley ever informed him of it--and, beyond that, he’d known that it would be dangerous for Aziraphale if it _was_ returned. Crowley simply hadn’t cared about anything but the last, and that, he thought of as a bridge that he’d never have to worry about crossing. 

He could just love Aziraphale, and not bother the angel with the telling, and it would be a finer sort of secret than him rather liking humanity and rather not liking the idea of the world ending and occasionally being a bit nice because the rest of the world had already rung all the bells on the bastardry board that day. Crowley had just miscalculated a bit on the extent to which loving the angel would hurt, once he’d finally gone and done it.

He’d never really wanted to give it up, though. It had been wonderful, perfect, during those fleeting occasions when Aziraphale was startled or drunk or forgot himself for a moment, and Crowley could bask in a flash of desire or an unexpected intimacy or a gush of affection. All those brief moments when the angel surprised himself with whatever was percolating away in that pretty head of his, and Crowley was the lucky beneficiary. He’d been greedy for it, battened on it, had to tear himself away from it like a vampire trying not to kill a thing from feeding on it. 

And it had been worth it, worth it ten times over, and he’d remembered that during all the times it had been painful.

Sure, he’d wished it hurt less, especially when Aziraphale was angry with him--or had done something Heaven didn’t like and was under heightened scrutiny--and they saw far less of each other than usual. He’d wished he could suspend it for a bit, sort of put it to sleep and stuff it in a corner for later, especially when they’d really wound up on opposite sides of something and there was no weaseling out of it without open revolt, when it felt like worry and dread would swallow him whole. He’d wished he hadn’t waded into it quite so deeply, after Aziraphale had shouted at him for wanting holy water and accused him of wanting to kill himself and cast him out of paradise a second time.

But Crowley had never wanted to stop loving him. Why would he? What would it cost him, if he was found out? For all Aziraphale’s ominous warnings about Hell destroying him if they caught on to the arrangement, Hell would also destroy him for having a real affection for humanity, for having lied on his reports one too many times when he didn’t feel like shoving humanity back onto its knees, or flubbing some mission on accident, or coming up with something that went annoyingly well and caused Heaven to step up their game in response, or because it was Tuesday and someone high enough in the ranks felt like it. Hell didn’t _need_ a reason; it was one of the things that had always made Crowley so cavalier about giving them one.

It had been hard not to mock the angel a bit, when he worried about it. Oh, Hell would destroy him? They’d destroy him for any one of a thousand things he’d already done--what was one more? Especially when being nice to an angel--being nice to _Aziraphale_\--was the most pleasurable one by far. When it was the sort of rebellion that felt like hope. 

He could always stop and think of Aziraphale and feel that bright spark in his veins, that warmth flowing through him. If the angel was actually sitting there and smiling at him and happy--happy because of something Crowley had said, or done, or given him--it was sometimes enough to let Crowley think he’d never fallen. And, at the end of the day, it was a thing that was _his_.

No one could take it away from him--not God, not Heaven, not Lucifer, not even Aziraphale. No matter where he was or what he was doing or what had happened, he could love the angel. He might never lay eyes on him again, never wheedle his way back out of Hell again, but they could never stop him from loving the kind, brave, stubborn angel who’d smiled at him and asked him out for oysters and reminded Crowley that the world always had more to offer than he thought it did. They could kill him, but they couldn’t kill that.

One of the cumulus clouds drifting overhead looked too ridiculously, perfectly cloudlike to really exist, and Crowley snorted to himself. He sat up and looked around; no Aziraphale in sight. He smiled and snapped his fingers, and his sketchbook and pencils dropped into his lap. If it turned out well, maybe he’d send it to Beelzebub with a note that just said, “Thinking of you.” Best to keep them all on their toes for a bit, after all.

He dragged the blanket to the base of a tree and sat back against it, getting comfortable before he started. He’d probably be lucky if he could resist the urge to draw Aziraphale in his old robes, wings out and plucking a harp, perched on the topmost puffy white mound. Then again, why should he resist it? It wasn’t like Aziraphale was going to go rooting through his notebooks. He almost regretted burning the orchid painting he’d finished an hour before Aziraphale had shown up for dinner, but then he hadn’t been able to look at it without remembering Aziraphale’s reaction to the pitcher plant, and after that there’d been no point in keeping it around.

Crowley shook his head. Poor angel. He’d definitely need to say something about the apology.

What was it Aziraphale had said? _“It felt like refusing orders.”_

Crowley shuddered, then pushed the thought away and started drawing. 

How long had Aziraphale been torturing himself over loving a demon? The occasional bit of lust had been cropping up since that first knock-around in Rome, unless Crowley’s overactive imagination had led him astray once again. But love? In a way that the angel couldn’t talk himself out of what it was? Crowley shook his head. Whenever it had happened, he didn’t think he’d been around for it; Aziraphale could only have been beside himself with it, and surely Crowley would have noticed him having a life-ruining epiphany like that. 

Crowley was probably lucky Aziraphale had ever gotten around to saying something about it at all, the way _that_ had likely gone. Crowley’d had nothing to lose that he hadn’t already lost, nothing left that could be taken away that was really his to begin with, but Aziraphale’d had… well, everything. God’s grace, his place in Heaven--not that Crowley thought it was really worth a damn, but it had meant so much to Aziraphale--the power he needed to protect himself. 

Possibly his life, depending on what mood the revelation caught the archangels in, and Crowley didn’t think Aziraphale’s head had ever been deep enough in the sand to miss that, however much Aziraphale might have protested that they wouldn’t right up until they had tried.

As hard as Crowley’d clung to it, Aziraphale had probably tried just as hard to rid himself of it, and why not? Risk humiliation, exile, damnation, and death, all for someone who probably couldn’t love him back? Crowley’d done his damnedest never to give the angel a reason to regret letting him have as much as Aziraphale had given him, but he’d never dared ask for more in the sort of way that would tip his hand, get him banished. He’d never dared ask for more in a way that would leave Aziraphale questioning their friendship, or the arrangement, or Crowley’s sincerity. 

If Crowley had been surprised to discover that demons could still love something besides their own miserable selves, how could the angel have guessed at it?

Aziraphale would have been an idiot not to at least try to stop, and Crowley would have to be an idiot not to understand why he’d wanted to. Anything Aziraphale had done, he’d done to save at least himself and more often the both of them, and Crowley wouldn’t have him debasing himself over it. Whatever Aziraphale had done, he’d done to preserve the thing Crowley loved most in all the universe, and how could the precious fool think Crowley would blame him or be angry with him over it?

Crowley shifted irritably when the cloud changed direction slightly with the stiffening breeze. He’d lose sight of it before he finished with it, if he didn’t hurry. He pulled out his phone and took a reference picture, just in case. Such a ridiculously perfect, fluffy thing, of course it couldn’t stay in one place long enough for him to...

Crowley took a deep breath and swallowed. He set the phone back down and tossed his sketchbook aside and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes. Aziraphale had thought Crowley could blame him and be angry with him over it because that’s what he’d gotten from every other fucking quarter, for six thousand fucking years, and they’d all called it love, too, hadn’t they?

The other angels, possessors of God’s grace and executors of God’s plan, arbiters of love and forgiveness and righteousness, screaming at what they’d thought was Aziraphale to shut his stupid mouth and die. Crowley stared at the cloud.

“I’m sorry I didn’t rip Gabriel’s fucking throat out with my bare teeth when I had the chance,” he said, just in case She was listening.

If She was, there was no sign of it. Same as always, really, and Crowley suddenly didn’t want to sit on a blanket next to a picnic basket in a park and draw a fucking cloud while Aziraphale was wandering around taking his first fumbling steps toward freedom after millennia of enforced helplessness. Crowley checked to make sure no one was paying attention, and then he turned into a snake, concertinaed his way up the tree, and coiled himself over the lowest branch to have a proper fume about everything.

It lasted a good half hour before he heard an aggrieved huff from over by the blanket, followed in short order by a very small gasp from directly below him.

“Do you think it’s indigenous?” a boy asked, and Crowley stifled a groan.

“Don’t be stupid, of course it’s not indigenous. There are only six sorts of reptile on the whole island, and all of them put together wouldn’t be that big.”

“_I am, however, naturalizssed_,” Crowley snapped, raising his head to glare at the little girl who’d almost been War and the little boy who’d almost been… Famine, Crowley thought. He’d believed in nutritious lunches or something else completely mad, but he’d believed in it hard enough to do the trick.

The boy’s eyes got wide as saucers behind his glasses, and the girl’s eyes narrowed and her hands balled into fists at her sides. Crowley almost smiled; he knew exactly the sort of peace she believed in, and if that wasn’t humanity all over, he didn’t know what was.

“Are you here about Adam?” she demanded. He looked pointedly from her to the remains of the picnic.

“_And jussst decssided to ssstop for a nibble firssst?_”

The boy pushed his glasses back up his nose and held up Crowley’s sketch of the cloud. “Are you aware that littering is clearly prohibited by prominently posted signs?”

Crowley tilted his head, then dipped so that his head and neck were clear of the canopy. His sketchbook was open and fluttering half of its contents into the grass. “_Oh, **ballsss**._”

He miracled it back together and then miracled it into the basket.

“My parents say that’s not appropriate language for adults to use around children.”

“_I’m not an adult,_” Crowley grunted, curling back up to rest on the branch. “_And you’re not children. You’re…_” He squinted and flicked his tail. “_...miniature horsssemen._”

The girl raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms.

“_Miniature equessstriansss,_” Crowley sighed.

“We’re not miniature anythings. I’m Wensleydale, and this is Pepper, and my parents say we’re all perfectly sized for ourselves, even when we get growth spurts and nothing fits.”

“_Your parentsss sssound like ridiculousss people,_” Crowley scoffed. “_Though I sssuppossse they did help sssave the world, after a fassshion._”

Even if it was only by birthing and raising an equally ridiculous child.

“You promise you’re really not here for Adam?” Pepper asked. Crowley flicked his tongue out at her and cocked his head, and she scowled at him. “There’ve got to be _some_ rules to being a… a… whatever you call yourselves, or there wouldn’t be any people. You’d have done us all in, like when there aren’t any hunting regulations and the ecosystem collapses.”

“_No, I’m not here for Adam. I couldn’t give lesss of a damn what Adam’sss up to thessse daysss._” Crowley paused. “_Provided it’sss not Apocalypssse-related, anyway._”

“That’s actually also not appropriate language to use around children.”

“_You could treat it asss an opportunity to learn asss many new wordsss asss you like,_” Crowley pointed out. The Carolingians in particular had come up with some stuff that Crowley’d been rather sad to see fall out of common usage.

“Please,” Pepper said, tossing her curls. “That’s what the internet is for.”

“_I don’t come with monitoring sssoftware_,” Crowley said, smiling. 

“My mother says monitoring software is a method of acclimating a population to authoritarian surveillance and control by aligning parents with the state apparatus against their own children, thus fracturing the last social unit capable of challenging the state’s authority or transmitting an interpretation of reality different from that disseminated by the state and corporate mass media,” Pepper told him.

Crowley shrugged. “_Sssoundsss about right._”

Wensleydale’s wide eyes shifted to something above Crowley’s branch. He followed the boy’s gaze and bit back a groan. He was halfway up a damned apple tree, offering to teach a pair of eleven-year-olds as many curses as they could pronounce. If the angel popped up before he got rid of them, Crowley would never hear the end of it.

“_I’ll get it for you if you promissse to go away,_” Crowley told him.

“Don’t listen to him,” Pepper muttered. “Probably something horrible will happen if you eat it.”

“_You kicked War in the ssshinsss and ssstole her sssword,_” Crowley said, exasperated. “_Sssomething horrible’sss practically guaranteed to happen no matter how many applesss you eat._”

Pepper’s brows furrowed, and then she seemed to come to some decision. “Help me up, so I can get it for myself.”

Crowley dipped his head and scanned the lawn. No sign of Aziraphale. He frowned and tightened his grip on the branch. “_Are your handsss at leassst clean?_” 

He always forgot how light children were--it was always a surprise when he picked them up--but the one thing that never changed was how they grabbed at everything with their quick little hands.

“Actually, it’s Brian who’s the sticky one,” Wensleydale piped up. Crowley shuddered.

Pepper jumped but didn’t say anything when Crowley looped a coil around her hips and hoisted her up into the tree. She grabbed onto him until she could get a good grip on the branch above them, and Crowley wrinkled his nose. Maybe the stickiness inherent in humans of a certain age was metaphysical in nature and not a condition of whether or not they’d recently been grubbing about in the dirt. She at least smelled like a child and not like gunpowder, petrol, and blood.

Crowley draped his neck over the branch above them in case she lost her grip, and she picked the apple Wensleydale wanted and threw it down to him. She pursed her lips and looked at the few others still on the tree, which were higher up. Crowley hissed irritably and slithered up, acutely aware of how large their eyes were and how shallow their breathing was as they watched him move. _Eve_ hadn’t been frightened of him.

He tested the new branch, wrapped around it, and then gave Pepper another boost up. She grabbed the next apple, the branch above them swaying slightly at her bracing herself on it.

“_Mind you don’t hit him with it,_” Crowley said. Pepper paused, adjusted her grip on the apple, and tossed it underhand to the waiting Wensleydale, who still almost caught it with his face.

“Use your shirt like an apron,” Pepper told him. She clicked her tongue and shook her head when he jammed both forearms into the slack of his shirt and balled his hands up in the hem. “I said an apron, not a fireman’s blanket. It’s going to bounce out again, like that video with the bear.”

“_Jussst get the lassst two,_” Crowley grumbled, and Satan help him if they were picking enough for a pie or their families or something else that would take all day. They could have one apiece, and they could argue about the best way to catch them while they were walking back to wherever it was they spent their time when they weren’t harassing strangers about litter. He could feel a cold, itchy prickle on the back of his skull and down his neck, like God had just had an idea She found particularly amusing, and he fully intended to have this wrapped up and done with by the time She got around to implementing it. 

If it had to happen, let it at least hit him in private, with a sympathetic angel there to kiss it better and precisely zero children anywhere in the vicinity.

Pepper picked the next two apples she could reach, tucking one into the crook of her arm and tossing the other down to Wensleydale. As she’d predicted, it hit the taut fabric and bounced. As it was just Crowley’s--and possibly the boy’s--luck, instead of bouncing out and safely onto the ground, it bounced up and hit Wensleydale in the nose.

“Damn!” He staggered back a step, hands going to his face. 

“Oh, balls,” Pepper said, wincing.

“_God isss mocking me,_” Crowley muttered.

Wensleydale lowered his hands. “I’m all right, I think, actually?”

Pepper and Crowley stared at the bright, arterial red smear on his nose and fingers.

“_Ah…_” Crowley squirmed, muscle rippling under his skin. “_I can fixss that._”

“He’s a bit of a bleeder,” Pepper whispered.

“_I can ssstill fixss it_.”

“Oh.” Wensleydale looked down at his hands, and the blood from his nose dripped onto his shirt, and he got the blood on his hands on his pants as he fumbled to pull a handkerchief out of his pocket. “It’s all right, still, I think. The school nurse said what to do for nosebleeds. You actually only need to--” He tipped his head straight back and held the handkerchief to his nose, and Pepper winced. “--do this, and it will stop on its own.”

“Hold this?” she asked, holding her apple out to Crowley. He just looked at her. “That apple will be bruised, we need another one.”

He grumbled but took the stem delicately between his teeth. She picked a fifth apple, leaning too far for his comfort even with a hand on the branch and one leg out for balance, and then scrambled back toward him. He lowered her to the bottom branch, slithered down himself, got a decent grip, and bobbed his head down to look at the mess the boy had made of his face. 

One child-sized miracle was all it took to repair the damaged blood vessels, but Crowley threw in another one to take care of the swelling and soreness just because he felt like it. Wensleydale had, after all, helped save the world, and it was hardly every day a normal, ordinary, human child was stuck doing something like that. Crowley hadn’t especially liked having to do it, and he hadn’t even had to go back to school afterwards.

Crowley dropped the replacement apple into the boy’s hands, and then looped himself back up to help Pepper to the ground. She steadied herself on his neck as he lowered her, one coil under the back of her legs and another around her ribs this time--no more accidents, not when they were this close to finished.

He heard the shrill barking at the same time he heard the shouted, “Children! Run!” and saw the polished, hardwood walking stick coming down square at his face. Crowley glared at the old man swinging it, and he froze, face going blank and walking stick falling from his hand. The dachshund jumping around his feet and yapping its head off began growling at Crowley, and Crowley growled back.

“_Sssit._”

The dog whimpered and sat at its master’s feet, looking as chastised as a dachshund could.

Only then did Crowley notice the angel standing about ten feet behind the old man, his wide blue eyes going from the child covered in blood to the child suspended in Crowley’s coils to the old man in a trance. Wensleydale picked that moment to bite into his apple, the crisp flesh giving way under his teeth with the same sort of attention-demanding crunch-crackle as someone navigating a bag of lozenges at the philharmonic. Pepper sensed a moment for solidarity, polished her apple on her shirt, and then began eating as well.

Aziraphale took a deep breath. His hair was disheveled, the cuffs of his trousers were covered in mud, and if they’d been mortal, his shoes would have been a total write-off. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and Crowley couldn’t imagine what had happened to produce all that when he’d only let the angel out of his sight for an hour.

“I’ll be waiting in the car,” Aziraphale said evenly, and Crowley was proud of himself for not flinching at it. “When you’re finished putting all this to rights, I would very much like to go home.”

He walked past them toward the parking lot, and Crowley watched him go. God was indeed mocking him, it seemed.

He remembered himself when Pepper bit into the apple again, that crisp tearing sound ringing almost right in his ear, and lowered himself the last few feet to deposit her safely on the ground. He went ahead and miracled away the blood from Wensleydale’s clothes and skin, because Satan help him if the angel got another eyeful of that mess, and then turned back to the old man.

“_When you wake up, you’ll have had a lovely dream about…_” Crowley looked at Pepper and Wensleydale. “_What isss it he likesss bessst?_”

“Yelling at people,” Pepper said flatly.

“Actually, it’s when everyone follows the rules,” Wensleydale said. He frowned. “Even the really stupid ones.”

“Fine.” Pepper rolled her eyes. “He likes upholding the existing power structure best, and he likes yelling at people when they don’t comply second best.”

Crowley sighed. 

“_A lovely dream about telling people off for breaking the rulesss, and them promisssing they’ll never do it again._” He looked at them and jerked his head toward the footpath. “_Probably better if you two aren’t here when he sssnapsss out of it._”

They gathered up the rest of the apples and ran off, and Crowley grumbled to himself and shoved his corporation back into the shape of a person. He packed up the basket, stuffing everything into it even if it technically shouldn’t have fit, and glared at the dachshund.

“_Fine_,” he grunted. He looked at the old man. “A lovely dream about telling people off for breaking the rules, and them promising they’ll never do it again, and then you’ll give the dog an extra treat for being a particularly good boy.”

The dachshund only looked partially mollified, and Crowley snapped his fingers and stalked off. The sound of the man muttering to himself about litterbugs and the maintenance of public greens faded as Crowley’s legs ate up the short bit of distance left between him and the Bentley.

Aziraphale was sitting in the passenger seat, as promised, staring fixedly out the windscreen. Crowley frowned and miracled the angel’s clothes, shoes, and hair back into the state they’d been in when Aziraphale had started his walk. He tossed the basket into the back seat and settled in behind the wheel.

“You all right there, angel?” he asked softly.

“Just take me home,” Aziraphale said, closing his eyes. “Please.”

“W--” Crowley’s brows knit. “Home-home? Not the bed and breakfast?”

“_Home_,” he said, his voice tight, and Crowley held up his hands.

“Soho it is.” He started the car and raised left his arm in invitation, and Aziraphale practically threw himself against Crowley’s side. Crowley hugged him close and kissed his hair. “It’s all right, love. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll figure it out.”

Aziraphale made a disconsolate noise into Crowley’s shoulder, and Crowley hugged him tighter and pulled out of the lot.

It was a quiet drive home.


	4. Chapter 4

Aziraphale filled his wine glass and set it on the counter, his shoulders bunching under his shirt. It was intolerable, that Crowley was lounging on the couch flipping through a magazine instead of standing behind him, arm around his waist, chest against his back, fingers combing through his hair, telling him that everything was going to be fine. Intolerable, and entirely to be expected, because Aziraphale had been a bit… _sharper_ than usual, when he’d told Crowley not to fuss over him, and that he could manage a simple glass of wine in his own home without a minder.

He exhaled slowly, trying to get a grip on himself, and Crowley flipped through the magazine vigorously enough that he was more rattling it than reading it, the sprawling, stationary equivalent of stomping around and slamming doors.

“Oh, come here, would you?” Aziraphale muttered, and just like that, Crowley was hurling the magazine aside and sweeping up behind him.

Crowley’s arms wrapped around his ribs, and Crowley’s face was in his hair, and Crowley sighed against the back of his neck. Aziraphale tried not to melt into the embrace. He should make an attempt to preserve at least a little bit of his dignity today, shouldn’t he?

Aziraphale grimaced. He’d gotten lost in what couldn’t have been more than an acre or two of what barely qualified as woodland, and he’d felt enough snatches and shreds of love and virtue to power a platoon, and he hadn’t been able to do any of the things Crowley had described, and then when he’d finally given up and asked for help, the old man who’d led him back toward the picnic area had tried to bludgeon Crowley with his walking stick. Aziraphale had probably been fortunate to be spared an undignified spill in a mud puddle, or slipping on a banana peel, or some equally outrageous capstone to the day.

And then when they’d gotten home, Crowley had--

Aziraphale leaned back against Crowley’s chest and closed his eyes. Crowley had hesitated, hadn’t he, when they’d reached the bookshop’s threshold? Some part of him had expected to be turned away at the door. He’d driven Aziraphale home, and stood there on the sidewalk with the picnic basket in his hand, and reflexively braced for a summary dismissal.

“What happened, angel?” Crowley asked softly, his face still pressed into Aziraphale’s hair.

He started to relax against Crowley in spite of himself.

“Nothing happened,” Aziraphale sighed. “That’s the problem.”

“It’s your first time trying,” Crowley said, nuzzling at his neck. “You can’t be _this_ furious because nothing happened on your first try.”

Aziraphale let his hands rest on either side of the glass, and Crowley took it as an invitation to tighten his grip. A flame-edge of love licked at Aziraphale’s senses, and he wanted so badly to turn around and pull Crowley against him as hard as he could, to kiss him and hold him until it would never occur to Crowley that he might be unwelcome. So much love everywhere around him, and he’d been so sure that he’d be able to follow Crowley’s instructions about it, and…

Aziraphale huffed as Crowley’s lips found his earlobe. “Now who’s being distracting?”

“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Crowley murmured, his teeth grazing the delicate skin. “In lots and lots of things.” He found Aziraphale’s pulse and pressed a kiss over it. “It’ll come, angel.”

“You don’t know that,” Aziraphale said quietly.

“Well, no, I don’t _know_ that.” Crowley rested his pointy chin on the meat of Aziraphale’s shoulder, and it was all Aziraphale could do to not protest. There were times when Crowley’s lack of anything that could be described as cushioning was less than ideal. “But it stands to reason, dunnit? Demons can do it, and what’s there really been so far that we can do and you can’t?”

Aziraphale scoffed. “I can’t do a tenth of the things you do without even thinking about them.”

“Like what?” The point of his chin dug into Aziraphale’s shoulder again, and Aziraphale sighed and nudged him off. Crowley went back to resting his cheek on the back of Aziraphale’s head, and Aziraphale reached over his shoulder to ruffle Crowley’s hair. 

_Needy creature._ Why couldn’t anything ever be simple between them? Six thousand years, and they still couldn’t seem to stop doing this to themselves. It was like they couldn’t resist retreating back to a cave that they’d just found the way out of instead of finally taking to the sky.

“You… disobey,” Aziraphale said, after a moment. He wanted to say _“Practically everything!”_, but Crowley would never let him get away with it. Crowley’s tricks were many and varied and fast as quicksilver, and sometimes it seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t do, except understand that Aziraphale couldn’t. “You can just do whatever you please, whenever you please, without even blinking at it. I could never--”

“Angel, you gave away that damn sword five seconds after God got done telling you humanity could get fucked.” Aziraphale could feel Crowley’s smile, hear it in his voice. “I’m not saying you didn’t also give yourself half a panic attack when you did it, but you did do it, and before you even start to blame me for that one, I’ll have you remember that I hadn’t even introduced myself yet.”

“I was protecting God’s creation,” Aziraphale mumbled. He’d done it, yes, but he’d been so torn over it and so miserable that he’d been worried he might spontaneously discorporate afterward. It hadn’t been until Crowley had started poking at him about it that he’d begun getting defensive and justifying it, belatedly realizing that his justifications weren’t entirely lies.

“You were disobeying.” Crowley kissed his neck, breath puffing down Aziraphale’s collar as the bastard tried not to laugh. “You were being absolutely, egregiously, fantastically disobedient. Right out of the gate, too.” He nipped at Aziraphale’s earlobe. “Don’t give me that look. You know I’m right.”

“You have no idea what look I’m giving you,” Aziraphale protested. It was the truth, as opposed to the lie he’d wanted to tell, which was that he wasn’t giving Crowley a look.

“I can _feel_ it. It’s like a thunderbolt, ready to land and blast me right out of my skin the second you turn around and hit me with the full force of it.”

Aziraphale winced. There wasn’t even any heat to it--Crowley’d meant to tease him, with that. He shook Crowley off and turned around, and Crowley frowned, his brows furrowing.

“Don’t get your feathers ruffled, angel,” he said gently. “I’m just saying--you don’t give yourself enough credit. Or you give me too much credit.”

“That’s not--” Aziraphale exhaled slowly and wrapped his fingers around the lapels of Crowley’s jacket, and Crowley leaned in again, hands settling on Aziraphale’s hips. “I need to ask you something, and I want you to be honest with me.”

Crowley blinked at him, the rest of his face suddenly very, very still, and Aziraphale thought that maybe he could spend the rest of eternity apologizing for everything he’d done to make Crowley so afraid of telling him the truth and it wouldn’t be enough.

“Or at least try to be honest with me, please,” Aziraphale said, and Crowley drew back as if he’d been burned. Aziraphale let him go, suddenly unsure if holding onto him would work now. It had seemed to, that morning, but God, it felt like forever ago that Crowley had let him pin him down and say _beloved_ into his skin.

“Wh… you… that’s…” Crowley licked his lips and looked around, hand going unbidden to his hair, fingers running through the red shock of it. “Angel--”

Crowley broke off in a frustrated noise, and Aziraphale took Crowley’s hands in his and waited for him to calm down.

“Why did you think you wouldn’t be welcome here, when we got back?” Aziraphale asked, keeping his tone gentle.

“I… where did you…” Crowley groaned and threw back his head, and Aziraphale didn’t let go when he went to turn away. Crowley stopped and looked down at their hands, a trapped expression on his face. “What kind of a question is that, angel?”

“The kind I need an answer to,” Aziraphale sighed. “Please.”

“Fucking hell.” 

Crowley glared at him, face contorting around his glasses, and Aziraphale tightened his grip. _Unforgivable, that’s what I am._ He’d let Crowley walk away--practically sent him away--too many times already.

“You are allowed to want a few fucking minutes to yourself, angel,” Crowley said flatly. He twisted his arms so that Aziraphale either had to let go or risk bruising him, and Aziraphale let go. “You’re allowed to have had a bad day, and want some peace and quiet.” He stalked away, gesturing around them to the shelves. “This is your _home_, you don’t have to justify--” 

Crowley stopped and took a deep breath, his fingertips digging into his brows.

“You don’t have to account for yourself to anyone anymore,” he continued, anger simmering under his words, and Aziraphale tilted his head.

“I don’t see how that actually answers my question,” he pointed out quietly.

Crowley hissed to himself and looked up at the ceiling. “You were upset, yeah? Which is usually when you want everybody the fuck away from you for a bit until you’re a bit less upset, right? I mean, I’m not going to barge in and fucking--”

He broke off with a snarl and waved his hands at the rest of the bookshop, his whole frame vibrating with tension. He glanced back at Aziraphale, and then he deflated suddenly, looking ashamed of himself and almost fragile. Aziraphale wanted so badly to take those damnable glasses off his face so he could see Crowley’s eyes, but he didn’t dare touch him, not when he was like this. Aziraphale couldn’t bear it if Crowley bolted and really did leave him alone.

“We’ve known each other for a fucking eternity, angel,” Crowley said after a moment, his throat bobbing and his gaze resolutely on anything but Aziraphale. “It’s hardly fair to make you go around asking for something when you’re in a state and I already know you want it, is it?”

Aziraphale rubbed his face and tried to think around the yawning chasm that had just opened up at his feet. Six thousand years, and everything they’d been to each other, everything they’d meant to each other, had been so utterly deformed by circumstance, warped almost beyond recognition by the weight of everything they’d been carrying.

“Crowley,” he said, and the demon stiffened. “Crowley, come here, please.”

“So you can apologize for needing things?” Crowley asked sourly. He moved closer, though, and Aziraphale reached for him gratefully. Crowley let his forehead rest against Aziraphale’s, and Aziraphale kissed him gently, and Crowley sighed against his lips. “I don’t want you piling hurt on top of hurt, angel. You don’t need to say you’re sorry for what you want, or…”

“This has never been about what I wanted,” Aziraphale said, and he was glad of his grip on Crowley’s waist when Crowley tried to recoil from that. “Stop it with the theatrics and _listen_ to me, won’t you?”

Crowley stilled against him, jaw tight and shoulders tighter, and Aziraphale risked reaching up between them and easing Crowley’s glasses off. His pupils were narrow slits, focused and tracking Aziraphale’s every twitch, and Aziraphale sighed, put the glasses on the counter, and ran his fingers through Crowley’s hair.

“This has never been what I wanted. This has been…” Aziraphale took a deep breath. He’d never let himself look too closely at it, before. He hadn’t wanted to admit what a coward he was, or how far he’d strayed, or why everything seemed so hard. “This has been about what was safe, and what was comfortable, and what I could get away with, and what I could control, and what posed the least risk to us both, and… and a million other things.”

He cupped Crowley’s cheek with his free hand, and Crowley closed his eyes and leaned into it. He looked tired, and Aziraphale felt the echo of it in his own corporation.

“There’s never been a time when what I _wanted_ was to send you away, or make you wait, or shut you out,” Aziraphale continued. 

And it was true, wasn’t it? Even when he had, he hadn’t--not really. If God Herself had turned up and told him She only wanted him to be happy, it wouldn’t have been, “Please, Lord, lift this burden from my shoulders.”

Aziraphale dropped his hand and snaked that arm around Crowley’s waist as well, hugging the demon to him more tightly. It had been such a complicated, festering mess, and he’d never dared believe that there could come a time when they could get clear of it. He hadn’t entirely thought through to what it would mean, if they did.

“I was afraid, and I was weak. I’d apologize again, but you’ve already said…” Aziraphale laughed softly, and he laid his cheek on Crowley’s shoulder. “Mostly, I think, what I’m trying to say is that I love you, and there’s no part of that which involves being happy with you waiting on the doormat, or not picking up the phone, or holding back when you want me.” Crowley’s fingers spasmed against his back, and Crowley tilted his head, pressing their faces together. “Don’t just go and do something that you don’t want because you think it’s what I want. Ask me, at least. Let me _decide_.”

He clutched Crowley to him, and he let out the breath he’d been holding when Crowley let him.

“Belov--”

“I swear on every misprinted Bible you’ve got stuffed into this antiquated fire hazard, if you make me cry right now, I’m going to bite you,” Crowley grumbled.

“Not what I meant to do,” Aziraphale told him. “And besides that, I don’t think you really would.” He smiled and breathed in the smell of Crowley’s skin. “You’re too _nice_\--”

“Ugh.”

He could feel the face Crowley was pulling, without even looking at him. “And _sweet_\--”

“Uuuuugh.”

“And _adorable_\--”

“I’m being punished for something, aren’t I?” Crowley groaned, but his breathing was easier than a moment ago, when it had sounded like he really might cry, and he was softer in Aziraphale’s arms.

“Mmm.” Aziraphale leaned back and looked at him. “Well, you did somehow manage to terrorize an entire public park in the space of an hour. You must have started the second I let you out of my sight.”

“I was the injured party there, angel.” Crowley gave him a hurt look, disbelief and outrage stamped into his features. “Minding my own business, happy as a clam, and suddenly I’m set upon from all sides by--”

“Two prepubescents, an old man, and a dog you could fit in your handbag?” Aziraphale finished archly. “How did they even notice you, surely--”

“The kids were--well, you saw them, right? War and Famine, if things had played out worse,” Crowley said, frowning. “I don’t know that we’re quite as invisible to them as we used to be, even when we’re trying. And then of course it wasn’t me the old man zeroed in on, was it?”

“Still, though.” Aziraphale pursed his lips, and Crowley pouted.

“They started it.”

It was all he could do not to laugh. Yes, the small children had started it--the huge demon-snake coiled up in an apple tree handing out fruit they’d never have been able to reach themselves had had absolutely nothing to do with it.

“How do you get yourself into these things?” Aziraphale asked, shaking his head. 

He’d been too sorry for himself over getting lost and too worried about not having been able to manage even the faintest bit of skimming, or siphoning, or however Crowley wanted to describe it, to notice that the irritable neighborhood watchman who’d agreed to see him back to the picnic area had spotted the sort of disturbance that he’d been waiting for since his retirement. By the time Aziraphale’s attention had been back on his surroundings, it had been too late to do more than watch in horror as Crowley threw Mr. Tyler into a trance to avoid a sound drubbing--possibly well-deserved, given the state of the children--and gave Aziraphale a guilty look while a pair of children ate apples in a display of defiance against… something. Aziraphale honestly would prefer that bit remain a mystery.

“How do _I_\--?” Crowley glared at him. “I was an innocent bystander. Blameless as a newborn babe, guiltless as--”

“And yet somehow this sort of thing always seems to happen to you,” Aziraphale said mildly. He let his smile quirk up at one edge when Crowley made an indignant noise.

“That is nothing more than vicious slander.” Crowley dipped his head and nipped at Aziraphale’s throat. “False accusations.” He sucked at the skin, and Aziraphale let his head fall back to give the demon more room to work. “Utter _calumny_.”

Aziraphale smothered a laugh when Crowley finally found a spot that tickled, and he shifted back to make him stop for a moment.

“I would never,” Aziraphale said evenly, reaching for his wine glass, “level anything but the most well-supported and thoroughly-sourced accusations.” He leaned back against the counter, gave Crowley a look, and sipped his wine. “I am, after all, an angel.”

Crowley’s eyes narrowed. “That you are.”

Aziraphale shivered at the tone in his voice, that smoke-curl of hunger hanging heavy over his words with no attempt made to hide it.

He’d tried telling himself, a very long time ago, that if Crowley was interested it was only on account of that--that all the demon wanted to do was despoil an angel. He’d tried telling himself that it was just a game for Crowley--and that was if Aziraphale wasn’t simply imagining it. He’d told himself that story often enough that later, it had come back on him as a fear, creeping in around the edges whenever he wanted to believe that Crowley had somehow contrived to truly love him. Funny how it had taken a trip to Hell itself to finally put the idea in the ground; the horde had had nothing but seething, snarled, and perfectly cold contempt for Michael. No lust, no desire to possess--certainly none of the warm fondness and exasperated affection with which Crowley had treated him from almost the very beginning.

Crowley smirked, and Aziraphale gasped when Crowley scooped him up in his arms, the pettiest of miracles keeping the wine from spilling when Aziraphale almost dropped it. After a moment, the glass vanished, only to reappear intact on the counter.

“_Sssuch a tragedy that you’ve fallen into my clutchesss,_” Crowley said, brushing a kiss over Aziraphale’s lips.

“Oh.” Aziraphale could feel his cheeks heating. “Mmm. Yes. Quite tragic.”

He squirmed in Crowley’s arms, a blushing experiment with how tightly Crowley might hold him, and Crowley kissed him harder and held him fast.

“Quite tragic, indeed,” Aziraphale breathed. _Carry me upstairs, please. I’m yours, I love you, don’t let go._

Crowley could barely keep his smirk from turning into a grin, but he managed it, visibly tamping down on it whenever it got too wide or too pleased. He carried Aziraphale through the shop, carefully navigating around spots where the unshelved piles and mounds had gotten somewhat out of hand. Aziraphale really had meant to keep up with it, but they’d been so busy in the last decade…

“Oh, bugger,” he sighed, when they got to the staircase. It wasn’t so narrow when it was just a person climbing the steps, but there was no way they were getting up it as they were. He had a momentary, irrational impulse to just miracle the thing into a grand ballroom staircase, with plenty of room for Crowley to sweep him up to the second floor and physics be damned.

Crowley laughed and put him down. “_A miraculousss reprieve._”

Aziraphale took his hand, lacing their fingers together, and kissed him. “Don’t tease, dear. I’ve had a very long day.”

He tugged Crowley along after him, up the stairs and into the bedroom, and Crowley took his time undressing him before laying him out on the bed.

“_Sssuch an exssquisssite prizsse_,” Crowley murmured, kissing his way down Aziraphale’s stomach. His fingers wrapped around Aziraphale’s hips, and Crowley sucked a tiny bruise where hip met belly. 

“Am I?” Aziraphale breathed. It was a struggle to keep his hands out of Crowley’s hair, to keep his thighs from squeezing against Crowley’s ribs. He was beautiful like this, all sinuous curves and long lines, and Aziraphale wanted to drain him to the lees. “Perhaps you, ah, ought to do something about it, then.”

Crowley looked up at him, smile turning bright for a moment before it slid into something sly and knowing. And then his mouth wrapped around Aziraphale’s cock, and it was no good trying to keep his hands off the demon’s hair, no good trying to keep his legs from wrapping around the demon’s chest, no good trying to keep himself from crying out at that warm, wet perfection.

Aziraphale arched back, groaning, and every wretched bit of the day fell away like so much rain-sodden clothing shed in front of a warm, dry hearth. He could see the flicker and spark of Crowley’s love dancing like flames behind his eyelids, peaking and flaring whenever he made a particularly appreciative noise or stroked Crowley’s hair or groped for Crowley’s hand. He could bask in just that, drink it in like sunlight. Crowley’s tongue curled around his cock, too long and thin and clever, and--_oh_.

Aziraphale gasped and spilled into Crowley’s mouth, and the warm flicker turned into a shower of embers. Crowley hummed against him, satisfied with his work, and Aziraphale shivered. If this was his reward for traipsing around in the woods in completely inappropriate shoes and a few too many layers, he would endeavor to be more sanguine about the next outing. 

Crowley rolled half onto his side, slipping a hand between himself and the mattress, and Aziraphale frowned and clicked his tongue.

“Here, love,” he said, pulling at Crowley’s shoulders, “let me.”

Crowley wriggled up to lie alongside him, face flushed and eyes shining, and Aziraphale kissed him deep enough that that serpent’s tongue of his flicked against Aziraphale’s, rekindling the tight, delicious ache at the root of his cock. He broke away only long enough to roll Crowley over, his back pressed to Aziraphale’s chest, and then pushed himself up on one arm so that he could kiss Crowley again even as his other hand found Crowley’s cock.

Beautiful, beloved, perfect creature, Aziraphale thought, and Crowley squirmed against him, Crowley’s mouth going slack and his breath coming faster. Aziraphale could do this forever if only Crowley would let him, the warm blast of Crowley’s affection rolling over him as the demon neared completion.

_Hardly fair to make you go around asking for something when you’re in a state and I already know you want it, is it?_

Aziraphale pressed his lips to Crowley’s throat and stroked him faster, the pad of his thumb gliding over Crowley’s slit, and Crowley hissed and moaned.

“Beloved,” Aziraphale murmured, just loud enough for Crowley to hear him over his own groans, and Crowley writhed in his arms and climaxed, his cries ringing in Aziraphale’s ears.

He lay there panting for a full minute, eyes half-closed and unseeing, and Aziraphale mouthed at the back of his neck and held him close.

“Are you trying to discorporate me?” he managed, when Aziraphale sucked at the soft skin just below his ear.

“Mmm.” Aziraphale pressed his face to Crowley’s throat. “You’ve found me out. This has all been a fantastically convoluted and wonderfully pointless assassination attempt.”

Crowley huffed a laugh and rolled over onto his back, his eyes going to Aziraphale’s. “Should have known it wouldn’t be so easy to hold an angel.”

“If it was easy, you wouldn’t want it.” Aziraphale kissed his cheek. Crowley and his delight in the complicated and the obscure, Crowley always offering choices and options and a way to take it back if it hadn’t been meant, Crowley only loving him harder the harder he was to love.

“Easy or difficult, the barest sliver or everything--” Crowley stretched and yawned. “--if it’s you, I promise I’ll want it.”

Aziraphale squeezed him gently, and it felt like his heart would burst. Impossible, wonderful creature. Aziraphale never wanted to let go of him. “I love you.”

Crowley exhaled softly, going boneless against him, and Aziraphale felt that answering warmth. He smiled and brushed Crowley’s hair back out of his face, and Crowley closed his eyes. Aziraphale felt sated, renewed, and ready for anything.

“We can go back to Tadfield tomorrow and try again,” he said quietly, tracing the shell of Crowley’s ear with a fingertip. “Just… stay with me, this time? Don’t send me off by myself?”

Crowley cracked one eye open again, then let it fall shut. “It’ll make it harder, sensing what you need, with me around swamping it.”

Aziraphale frowned. “What do you mean?”

Crowley gestured to himself, the motion languid to the point of sloppiness, then let his hand fall back to the sheets. “Infernal interference, yeah? Like a dampening field of damnation, or a signal jammer of sin, or--”

“Good Lord,” Aziraphale laughed, shaking his head. “You’re ridiculous.”

Crowley frowned and opened his eyes and looked vaguely irritated about being coaxed into an argument when he’d been drifting off to sleep. “What’s ridiculous about it? ’s true.”

“You haven’t caused any problems so far, have you? I could pick up on it perfectly well even with you close enough to reach out and touch.” It might be a bit complicated, separating the free-floating love from the stuff Crowley was spilling over with, but Aziraphale felt fairly confident he could do it without too much trouble. And having Crowley standing there to simply ask would hopefully sap some of the frustration out of having a set of instructions but no concrete details. “And I suppose if it really does make it impossible, you can go back to corrupting the youth--”

Crowley hissed petulantly and flicked out his tongue. “I wasn’t.”

“--and I can keep practicing by myself, but let’s not start there, hmm?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley sighed and shimmied closer to him, so that they were pressed side to side from shoulder to ankle. “If you want, we’ll try.”

“Thank you, Crowley.” Aziraphale kissed his temple.

They’d taken the room at the bed and breakfast for the week. They weren’t really expected; he couldn’t imagine anyone there who’d be looking forward to seeing them. They could meander about as long as they wanted and do as they pleased. And it would do them good, he thought, to have a bit of neutral ground to start dismantling all the things they’d only done and only been and only thought because of the circumstances they’d been trapped in.

Aziraphale idly stroked Crowley’s hair. They’d been so constrained, trying to reconstitute crumbs into something approaching a meal. There’d been so many countless times over the decades that he’d wanted nothing more than to hold Crowley to him, to take comfort in that embrace or soothe away whatever hurts the demon had suffered, only to hold back because it would have been even more painful to make himself let go again afterwards. It had been easier to ride it out himself, or suffer in silence, than to have what he wanted only to lose it again. The idea that Crowley might keep trying to contort himself to fit that narrow range of what they could have wasn’t to be borne.

Today had just been a bit of a misfire, that was all, a hiccup in the grand scheme of things. Crowley had been right; it was Aziraphale’s first time trying this particular trick, and he couldn’t expect everything to go flawlessly his first time out of the gate. It had taken months just to get through a passable gavotte, and that had been with infinitely patient and forgiving partners who could physically demonstrate everything Aziraphale needed to do to get it right. But it had been worth it, in the end--worth all the time spent practicing and trying and failing until he’d finally gotten the hang of it.

His eyes raked over Crowley, who’d settled into a light doze, and his smiled fondly. They’d spent millennia trying and failing and fumbling around and circling each other, and where would Aziraphale be if he’d given up any of the times he’d wanted to? A hell of his own making, that was where.

Aziraphale lifted his head and kissed Crowley’s shoulder.

“I love you,” he murmured, and the demon huffed. His hand found Aziraphale’s, though, and Aziraphale didn’t have to try at all to sense the fullness of that answering love pouring from him. 

He bit back a chuckle. It was a shame, he thought, that he couldn’t just use the love Crowley was throwing off like an occult power plant. It would solve their problems and then some, and with no tearing around the country at unsuitable speeds or annoying the local watch or helping the local children get up to God only knew what mischief.

He slotted his fingers between Crowley’s and rubbed his thumb across the back of Crowley’s hand, and Crowley’s fingers tightened against his. That warm affection spiked again, and Aziraphale smiled and shook his head. Such a shame.


End file.
